Plenge Lab

I read with interest a recent publication by Khandpur et al in Science Translational Medicine on NETosis in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis (download PDF here).  It made me think about “cause vs consequence” in scientific discovery.  That is, how does one determine whether a biological process observed in patients with active disease is a cause of disease rather than a consequence of disease?

In reading the article, I learned about how neutrophils cause tissue damage and promote autoimmunity through the aberrant formation of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs).  Released via a novel form of cell death called NETosis, NETs consist of a chromatin meshwork decorated with antimicrobial peptides typically present in neutrophil granules.  (Read more about NETs on Wikipedia here.) 

Mendelian randomization is a method of using measured variation in genes of known function to examine the causal effect of a modifiable exposure on disease in non-experimental studies (read more here).  It is a powerful to determine if an observation in patients is causal.  For example, if autoantibodies are pathogenic in RA, then DNA variants that influence the formation of autoantibodies should also be associated with risk of RA.  This is indeed the case, as exemplified by variants in a gene, PADI4, the codes for an enzyme involved in peptide citrullination (see here). …

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