ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we briefly review the quantitative trait loci (QTL) that have
been found for asthma and airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR) in mouse and human and show that many of these QTL map to homologous locations
in both species. Whenever QTL for asthma are concordant in both species,
we illustrate how comparative genomics can be used to narrow the QTL
regions, thus reducing the potential number of candidate genes to be eval-
uated. We also review the progress that has been made in other fields using
bioinformatics to find QTL genes and suggest that a systematic survey of
AHR in multiple inbred mouse strains followed by several QTL crosses
in the mouse could increase the usefulness of such bioinformatics tools for the field of asthma. Other chapters in this volume have reviewed the
mouse as a model for asthma (1) and the asthma linkages found by whole
genome scans in humans (2,3).
