Functional players in celiac diseaseidentification and genetic association/partehartzaile funtzionalak eritasun zeliakoan: identifikazioa eta asoziazio genetikoa

Abstract

Gluten sensitive enteropathy or celiac disease (CD) is a chronic, inflammatory disorder characterized by flattened villi on the small bowel mucosa, caused by intolerance to ingested gluten in wheat, rye and barley that develops in genetically susceptible individuals. The main genetic factors associated with celiac disease are MHC class II genes that encode HLA-DQ2 and HLA-DQ8 molecules. However, HLA genes are necessary but not suffient to develop CD and during the last years, a great effort has been done in order to find additional genetic susceptibility determinants in CD, and approaches include genetic linkage studies, candidate gene association studies (positional or functional candidates) and more recently genome-wide association (GWA) studies. In order to dissect the genetics of this complex autoimmune disease, the current project has focused on the search of functional players in celiac disease using as a basis whole genome expression microarray