Résumé
At one time, research on human genetic susceptibility to Chagas disease was behind that of other transmissible diseases. This is less true today. Many valuable studies have been published in recent years, made easier by the impressive progress in genomic technology and bioinformatics. Many candidate genes, pertaining either to the HLA system or to other systems, have proved to play a role in genetic susceptibility to Chagas disease, and to its clinical forms. Conversely, some negative results have been produced too. It will be worthwhile to go on with this search for putative candidate genes, which will be made easier thanks to the constant progress of genomics and bioinformatics. This chapter discusses some specific key concepts in the field that are still under debate. The most important of these is that it is misleading to focus exclusively on those genes that are assumed a priori to be more directly linked with susceptibility to Chagas disease without considering the general genetic background of the individuals or the populations under survey. It is more desirable to draw a general population genetic framework of the populations under study, and then to try and identify the genes of interest, and to follow their functioning and dynamics within that framework. This approach has been successfully applied to the study of pathogenic agents.