Recently, Zhang et al. examined serum IL-17 levels from 283 SLE cases and observed a significant synergistic epistatic interaction between two risk variants, rs10893872 and rs1128334, in the ETS1 gene, and the haplotype formed by these variants was significantly associated with serum IL-17 levels in SLE patients [31], which supports a role for genetic interaction contributing to the complexity of autoimmune disease [31-33]. This evidence concerns the gene ETS1 and systemic lupus erythematosus.