Dr Carl Anderson

CarlBroadly, my research aims to identify and characterise heritable factors which underlie variation within and between human populations. My recent research has centred around the design, analysis and interpretation of genome-wide association studies.

I am a member of the UK Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) genetics consortium and was heavily involved in the IBD arm of the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium study. I am also a leading member of the International IBD genetics consortium and, to-date, our efforts have identified over 30 Crohn's disease (CD) risk loci. I am currently leading efforts to identify risk variants for various clinically relevant and heritable subtypes of CD. In addition, current research is aimed at identifying genetic loci underlying variation in the other common form of IBD, Ulcerative Colitis (UC).

I am also the lead analyst for a genome-wide association study currently underway within the International Endometriosis Consortium. Endometriosis can be a debilitating condition that has a profound effect upon a women's quality of life. Little is currently understood about the aetiology of the disorder and we hope this study will give us valuable insight into the biological pathways which are involved in the disease, and perhaps even provide new therapeutic targets.

I am also involved in several methodological projects aimed at evaluating and increasing our ability to identify genetic variants underlying common human disease. Current focus areas include the detection of gene-gene interaction (where risk variants within two independent genetic loci are needed for a given trait to be observed) and the identification of rare-variants (where, due to the rarity of the risk increasing genetic polymorphism, standard methods for identification are not practical). I am also interested in the application of genotype imputation (where population haplotype data is used to statistically infer the genotypes at un-genotyped SNPs for partially genotyped individuals) in genetic epidemiology. I have several projects underway utilizing and researching this valuable new technique. Much of my methodological research is in collaboration with Andrew Morris and several other members of the Genetic and Genomic Epidemiology Unit.

Publications

  1. Pettersson HF, Anderson CA, Clarke GM, Cardon LR, Morris AP, Zondervan KT. Marker selection for genetic case-control association studies. Nature Protocols In Press (February 2009)
  2. Anderson CA, Massey DCO, Barrett JC, Prescott NJ, Tremelling M, Fisher SA, Gwilliam R, Jacob J, Nimmo ER, Drummond H, Lees CW, Onnie CM, Hanson C, Blaszczyk K, Ravindrarajah R, Hunt S, Varma D, Hammond N, Lewis G, Attlesey H, Watkins N, Ouwehand W, Strachan D, McArdle W, Lewis CM, The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, Lobo A, Sanderson J, Jewell DP, Deloukas P, Mansfield J, Mathew CG, Satsangi J, Parkes M. Investigation of Crohn's disease risk loci in Ulcerative Colitis further defines their molecular relationship. Gastroenterology 136: 523-529 (February 2009)
  3. Anderson CA, Zhu G, Falchi M, van den Berg SM, Treloar SA, Spector TD, Martin NG, Boomsma DI, Visscher PM, Montgomery GW. A genome-wide linkage scan for age-at-menarche in three populations of European descent. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 93: 3965-3970 (October 2008)
  4. Barrett JC, Hansoul S, Nicolae DL, Cho JH, Duerr RH, Rioux JD, Brant SR, Silverberg MS, Taylor KD, Barmada MM, Bitton A, Dassopoulos T, Datta LW, Green T, Griffiths AM, Kistner EO, Murtha MT, Regueiro MD, Rotter JI, Schumm LP, Steinhart AH, Targan SR, Xavier R, the NIDDK IBD Genetics Consortium, Libioulle C, Sandor C, Lathrop M, Belaiche J, Dewit O, Gut I, Heath S, Laukens D, Mni M, Rutgeerts P, Van Gossum A, Zelenika D, Franchimont D, Hugot JP, de Vos M, Vermeire S, Louis E, the Belgian-French IBD consortium, the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, Cardon LR, Anderson CA, Drummond H, Nimmo E, Ahmad T, Prescott NJ, Onnie CM, Fisher SA, Marchini J, Ghori J, Bumpstead S, Gwilliam R, Tremelling M, Deloukas P, Mansfield J, Jewell D, Satsangi J, Mathew CG, Parkes M, Georges M, Daly MJ. Genome-wide association defines more than thirty distinct susceptibility loci for Crohn's disease. Nature Genetics 40: 955-962 (July 2008)
  5. Anderson CA, Pettersson FH, Barrett JC, Zhuang JJ, Ragoussis J, Cardon LR, Morris AP. Evaluating the effects of imputation on the power, coverage and cost-efficiency of genome-wide SNP platforms. American Journal of Human Genetics 83: 112-119 (July 2008)
  6. Fisher SA, Tremelling M, Anderson CA, Gwilliam R, Bumpstead S, Prescott NJ, Nimmo ER, Massey D, Berzuini C, Johnson C, Barrett JC, Cummings FR, Drummond H, Lees CW, Onnie CM, Hanson CE, Blaszczyk K, Inouye M, Ewels P, Ravindrarajah R, Keniry A, Hunt S, Carter M, Watkins N, Ouwehand W, Lewis CM, Cardon LR, the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, Lobo A, Forbes A, Sanderson J, Jewell DP, Mansfield JC, Deloukas P, Mathew CG, Parkes M and Satsangi J. New genetic determinants of ulcerative colitis include the ECM1 locus and five loci implicated in Crohn's disease. Nature Genetics 40: 710-712 (May 2008)
  7. Anderson CA, Maclean A, Dunnigan MG, Pelosi AJ, Murray V, McKee I, McDonald G, Burt DW, Morrice DR, Muir WJ, Visscher PM, Blackwood DHR. A genome-wide linkage study in families with major depression and co-morbid unexplained swelling. American Journal of Medical Genetics (Part B): Neuropsychiatric Genetics 147B: 356-62 (April 2008)
  8. Ramagopalan SV, Anderson CA, Dessa Sadovnick A, Ebers GC. Genome-wide Study of Multiple Sclerosis. New England Journal of Medicine 357: 2199-2200 (November 2007)
  9. Anderson CA, Duffy DL, Martin NG, Visscher PM. Estimation of variance components for age at menarche in twin families. Behavior Genetics 37: 668-677 (September 2007)
  10. Cummings JR, Cooney R, Pathan S, Anderson CA, Barrett JC, Beckly J, Geremia A, Hancock L, Guo C, Ahmad T, Cardon LR, Jewell DP. Confirmation of the role of ATG16L1 as a Crohn's disease susceptibility gene. Inflammatory Bowel Disease 13: 941-946 (August 2007)
  11. Parkes M, Barrett JC, Prescott NJ, Tremelling M, Anderson CA, Fisher SA, Roberts RG, Nimmo ER, Cummings FR, Soars D, Drummond H, Lees CW, Khawaja SA, Bagnall R, Burke DA, Todhunter CE, Ahmad T, Onnie CM, McArdle W, Strachan D, Bethel G, Bryan C, Lewis CM, Deloukas P, Forbes A, Sanderson J, Jewell DP, Satsangi J, Mansfield JC, The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, Cardon LR, Mathew CG. Sequence variants in the autophagy gene IRGM and multiple other replicating loci contribute to Crohn's disease susceptibility. Nature Genetics 39: 830-832 (July 2007)
  12. Anderson CA, McRae AF, Visscher PM. A Simple Linear Regression Method for Quantitative Trait Loci Linkage Analysis With Censored Observations. Genetics 173: 1735-1745 (July 2006)
  13. Teare MD, Cox A, Shorto J, Anderson C, Bishop DT, Cannings C. Heterozygote excess is repeatedly observed in females at the BRCA2 locus N372H. Journal of Medical Genetics 41: 523-528 (July 2004)