Jeff Kilpatrick, Detecting causes of complex diseases

Detection of genetic mutations predisposing to disease has long been a central goal in biology. Unfortunately, the notion that a single gene gone awry causes disease is a vast oversimplification of a complex reality. To cope with this and other difficulties, biologists have developed methods for evaluating the state of ever larger proportions of the human genome with minimal cost and effort. Tragically, existing methods, which come from a era in which exponential running time was acceptable for the small n involved, are simply too slow to use in practice. We present a polynomial time heuristic for disease gene localization and compare it to the state of the art in genetic epidemiology.