Gene-Gene Interactions: An Essential Component to Modeling Complexity for Precision Medicine

Association methods in the biomedical sciences often focus on one genetic locus at a time. Alternately, studying gene-gene interactions, or epistasis, allows discovery of genetic regions that modulate the effect of other loci. With precision medicine as the goal of biomedical research, genetic interactions are essential to uncovering the still unknown complex mechanisms which lead to common diseases. This article delves into the fundamental background of genetic interactions, a history of this field of study, major challenges to identifying gene-gene models, and common methods to overcome these challenges. Finally, further complexity beyond genetic interactions will be considered.