Synthetic associations and all that

PLoS Biology has four items of great interest out today: - Synthetic Associations Created by Rare Variants Do Not Explain Most GWAS Results - Synthetic Associations Are Unlikely to Account for Many Common Disease Genome-Wide Association Signals - The Importance of Synthetic Associations Will Only Be Resolved Empirically - Common Disease: Are Causative Alleles Common or Rare? These are a response to last year's paper on synthetic associations from the Goldstein lab. Here's a critique of that that paper. I plan on reviewing the first in the list above soon. #3 is a response to #1 and #2 from David Goldstein, while #4 is a summation more aimed at the general audience.