**2.4 Polygenic rodent models**

As discussed, AMD is a multifactorial disease resulting from a mixture of multiple genetic and environmental factors. Because monogenic animal models do not represent the complexity of human AMD, combining multiple SNPs with nongenetic factors to create a polygenic animal model may prove beneficial for studying AMD pathogenesis as well as providing platforms on which to test new therapeutics that are being developed in laboratories across the world. Mice make excellent candidates for polygenic models of AMD due to the relative ease of manipulating their genomes and simplicity of affecting their environment [17, 34].
