ABSTRACT
A revolution in our understanding of human health and disease has been launched by the sequencing of a prototypical human genome. To a large degree, this achievement represents the pinnacle of reductionist scientific thought, as having all genes dissected one could in principle allow reconstitution of the organism. In contrast, the classical discipline of physiology has been dealing with systems from its very outset. Although clinically extraordinarily relevant, physiology remained an engineering embodiment of scientific
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thought distant from the molecular basis of function. Physiogenomics bridges the gap between the systems approach and the reductionist approach by using human variability in physiological process, either in health or disease, to drive their understanding at the genome level. Physiogenomics is particularly relevant to the phenotypes of complex diseases and the clustering of phenotypes into domains according to measurement technique, ranging from functional imaging and clinical scales to protein serology and gene expression.
