A first map of gene-gene interactions in the human cell. Credit: Chad Myers, University of Minnesota How do our genes determine our appearance and our susceptibility to disease? This question is central to biomedical research, and today we can sequence thousands of human genomes to identify these genes. However, genes work in complex networks. Building a global interaction map In a major transdisciplinary collaboration, an international team of geneticists and bioinformaticians set out to create a so-called genetic interaction (GI) map of a human cell. With significant contributions from the Canadian Donnelly Center, the University of Minnesota, the Hospital for Sick Children in Canada, the University Hospital Bonn, and the University of Bonn, a first draft has been published in Cell .…