Receptors are key proteins in our organism tasked with detecting signals from the environment, as well as allowing communication between different cells through neurotransmitters and hormones. They represent a substantial proportion of the proteins in our body and are also one of the main targets for the drugs currently used in the clinic (representing ~50% of them). In this project, we intend to analyse how receptors vary in the UKBiobank population and assess how individual differences in these receptors function can cause different susceptibility to disease, or affect our individual response to drugs. To do so, we will use our prior knowledge on the structure of these receptors, their tissue expression patterns, and their response to different drugs when receptors are mutated, to assess how genetic variation in the population can interfere with their function. In this way, we expect to detect and characterise genetic variants of these receptors that explain differences in the way our bodies sense important molecules for human physiology, and how this can affect our individual predisposition to health and disease. Furthermore, assessing how much difference there is in the population for these important drug targets, can help us select those available drugs that will most likely circumvent such differences or, alternatively, select those that will be most effective in patients with particular receptor variants.
