Summary
One of the great challenges of biomedical research in the 21st century is to understand the genetic architecture of all kinds of phenotypes, mainly complex diseases. The relevance of this challenge is such that it was one of the main arguments, more than 20 years ago, for sequencing the human genome and investing in many of the advances that followed. For almost two decades, the main methods of ascertaining the relationship between genomes and phenomes have focused on comparing large numbers of humans who present subtle differences in phenotypes of interest (an example are Genome-Wide Association Studies, or GWAS). In the talk we will review the main results of that research program, and argue the importance of an integrative view of biodiversity: extending the comparative method to other species, beyond humans, is a very promising complementary strategy that may allow overcoming the limitations of current methods.
Brief biography