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Professor Timothy Aitman

Contact

Professor Timothy Aitman: t.aitman @ csc.mrc.ac.uk
Personal Assistant: helen.figueira @ csc.mrc.ac.uk

Website

http://www.csc.mrc.ac.uk/ResearchGroups/ PhysiologicalGenomicsAndMedicine/ PhysiologicalGenomicsAndMedicineResearch.html

Biography

Tim Aitman is Professor of Clinical and Molecular Genetics at Imperial and Head of the CSC Physiological Genomics and Medicine Group. He founded the CSC Microarray Centre in October 2000 and has been its academic adviser since that time. As well as holding an MRC Programme grant, he is in receipt of funding from the UK Department of Health for clinical development of microarrays; from the Wellcome Trust for two consortium programmes (in functional genomics of cardiovascular disease and insulin resistance) and project grants from the BBSRC e-Science and Exploring Genomics programmes. He coordinates the EURATools FP6 Integrated Project for development of functional genomics tools in the rat. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Academy of Medical Sciences, is a member of editorial boards of the Journal of Lipid Research, Mammalian Genome and BMC Bioinformaticsand the British Heart Foundation's Project Grants Committee, and sits on the Advisory Board of the NIH Rat Genome Database.

Research Summary

Professor Aitman's research has focused on the genetic basis of cardiovascular and metabolic disorders. In his early work he carried out the genetic dissection of insulin resistance in rats and humans, the rat work leading to the identification of Cd36 as an insulin resistance gene (Aitman et al 1997, Nature Genet 14:197-201; Aitman et al 1999, Nature Genet 21:76-83; Pravenec et al 2001, Nature Genet 27:156-158). This was one of the first genes identified for any mammalian complex trait, and the first successful integrated use of microarray-based expression profiling with genetic linkage analysis. More recently he has used global expression profiling and linkage analysis to understand better the genes and metabolic pathways leading to the common syndromes of insulin resistance (Hubner et al 2005, Nature Genet 37:243-53) and have identified copy number variation in the Fcgr3 gene as a cause of glomerulonephritis and other autoimmune disorders in rats and humans (Aitman et al 2006, Nature 439:951-5; Fanciulli et al 2007, Nature Genet, in press), the first description of structural variation in the genome as a cause of autoimmune disease.

Microarray-based identification of Cd36 as an aberrantly-expressed gene in SHR. The hybridisation signal for SHR is drastically reduced compared to the Brown Norway (BN) and SHR.4 (congenic) control strains. (Aitman et al. (1999). Nature Genetics 21, 76-83.)

Publications

1. Fanciulli F, Norsworthy PJ, Petretto E, Dong R, Harper L, Kamesh L, Heward JM, Gough SCL, Smith A, Blakemore AIF, Froguel P, Owen CJ, Pearce SHS, Teixeira L, Guillevin L, Cunninghame Graham DS, Pusey CD, Cook HT, Vyse TJ, Aitman TJ. 2007. FCGR3B copy number variation is associated with susceptibility to systemic but not organ-specific autoimmunity. Nature Genet (in press). 2007.
2. Aitman TJ, Dong R, Vyse TJ, Norsworthy PJ, Johnson MD, Smith J, Mangion J, Roberton-Lowe C, Marshall AJ, Petretto E, Hodges MD, Bhangal G, Patel SG, Sheehan-Rooney K, Duda M, Cook PR, Evans DJ, Domin J, Flint J, Boyle JJ, Pusey CD, Cook HT. Copy number polymorphism in Fcgr3 predisposes to glomerulonephritis in rats and humans. Nature. 2006. 439: 851-5
3. Mueller M, Goel A, Thimma M, Dickens NJ, Aitman TJ, Mangion J. eQTL Explorer: integrated mining of combined genetic linkage and expression experiments. 2006. Bioinformatics 22: 509-11.
4. Hübner N, Wallace CA, Zimdahl H, Petretto E, Schulz H, Maciver F, Müller M, Hummel O, Monti J, Zidek, Musilova A, Kren V, Causton H, Game L, Born G, Schmidt S, Müller A, Cook SA, Kurtz TW, Whittaker J, Pravenec M, Aitman TJ. Integrated transcriptional profiling and linkage analysis for disease gene identification. Nature Genetics. 2005. 37: 243-253
5. Glazier AM, Nadeau JH, Aitman TJ. Finding genes that underlie complex traits. Science. 2002. 298, 2345-2349

Last updated 10/19/2007.