JPBS

Reading the Perspective paper by Boyle, Li, and Pritchard entitled “An expanding view of complex traits: from polygenic to omnigenic” [1], I was torn initially between feelings of doubt and accord. Under a very provocative title, the authors present an excellent integrational analysis of current knowledge, and summarize in clear words what many scholars in the field would ultimately concur with. Putting multifactorial traits and disorders into the framework of an “omnigenic” model seems like an overinterpretation of the evidence at first, but is subsequently qualified by the authors by giving their definition of omnigenicity on page 1182 as “...essentially any gene with regulatory variants in at least one tissue that contributes to disease pathogenesis is likely to have nontrivial effects on risk for that disease.”