Prioritisation of candidate genes and single nucleotide polymorphisms for dental caries susceptibility

Discovery of causal genes and awareness of risk factors for dental caries may assist development of personalised prevention and early detection of dental caries. A computational approach to identify and prioritise candidate genes and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) was developed and applied to dental caries susceptibility. Information on normal biological functions from gene ontology (GO) and on clinical relevance from the genetic association studies reported in literature identified good candidate genes. Although no significant agreement was found between the selected genes/SNPs from our study to those obtained from the first genome wide association study (GWAS) for caries susceptibility, it should be noted that the GWAS showed only moderate to weak associations. The genes that were prioritised in our study may still serve as high priority targets for searches of rare variants by whole exome/genome sequencing in future.