LAUSR

Multifactorial diseases are ones caused by multiple genetic disorders in conjunction with lifestyle and environmental factors (Figure 1). Although multifactorial diseases often cluster in families, they do not have a clear pattern of inheritance. Besides, the genetic variants associated with the complex disease are often common polymorphisms; therefore, pinpointing and analysis of disease-related genes to unravel disease mechanisms are a must. For these reasons, it is still difficult to study and has left many unanswered questions of multifactorial diseases regarding their etiology. The introduction of next-generation sequencing technologies observed so far has supported us to dissect different multifactorial diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer worldwide.We have observed great technological progress in genomics and computing in the last decade, enhancing our understanding of human genetics and diseases. Researchers can now analyze massive quantities of genomic data, by computational and experimental approaches means, to shed light on the pathogenesis of complex diseases. Nevertheless, there is a pressing need for high-quality investigations (e.g, leveraging the power of integration of datasets, proposing state-of-the-art approaches, etc.) to further exploremultifactorial diseases with complex pathogenesis since they are caused by numerous different factors like several variants in different genes. To date, various approaches have improved understanding of how genetics contribute to the development of diseases and the interaction of other factors that constitute diseases. With massive genetic and genomic data generated by next-generation sequencing technologies, the combination of computational and experimental approaches could potentially provide the tools needed to answer some fundamental questions and provide much-needed conclusions. This research topic of Frontiers in Genetics serves to collect novel cutting-edge computational and experimental methods helping to dive deeper into the underlying principle of genetics and genomics in multifactorial diseases with the emphasis of raising awareness of the role of genetics and genomics in multifactorial diseases. As a result, this can support us to answer unsolved questions such as what is the relative contribution of the genetic, epigenetic, microbiome, and environmental factors? How can genomics data be used to tackle big unanswered questions; such as, what causes the variation in phenotypes, disease susceptibility, and drug responses? From that, this topic makes a call for the submissions related to, but not limited to, the following topics: Edited and reviewed by: Richard D Emes, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom