Via Hit and Run, a Wired article: Battle of the New Atheism. The author talks with Dawkins and Dennett.

I just came across another argument for why the regulatory changes vs. protein coding changes argument is inane– sometimes protein-coding changes are regulatory changes. Ok, maybe RPM made that point in the comments on that post I linked, but here’s a great example, from a recent paper: The authors looked for local regulatory variation in […]

Adam Gopnik has an excellent essay in the most recent New Yorker arguing that Charles Darwin, while cultivating an image of an unassuming naturalist forced, by the facts, to reluctantly revolutionize modern thought, was really, well, a Darwinian fundamentalist. The article isn’t available online, but it’s worth a little effort to find. A couple excerpts […]

The twin concordance rate in autism is something like 90% for monozygotic twins and 5% for dizygotic twins. This suggests a signigicant role for genetics in the development of autism. A new study identifies one of the possible genetic contributors, a regulatory change in the MET gene. MET signaling is important in a number of […]

According to the latest estimates, the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived sometime around 5 million years ago. Since then, a lot has happened. Presumably, there has been plenty of change along the lineage leading to chimpanzees, but let’s be honest– from our point of view, a lot more has happened along our lineage. […]

It’s easy to make fun of studies like these, but hey, sometimes once you measure a phenomenon you find something unexpected. Not in this case, however: Among men, heavy alcohol use was associated with higher odds of all risky sex outcomes examined, including unprotected sex (AOR = 3.48; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.65 to 7.32), […]

Bruce Lahn is a Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago as well an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2004, he was on the “Top 40 Under 40” list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Specifics of his research can be found on his faculty page. Our 10 questions are in bold […]

In the comments of a previous post, rikurzhen asks the following question: do we know enough about recombination hot spots to say if they are heritable? if so, could the location of a hot spot itself be under selection? I responded that it would be tough to tell whether or not hotspots are heritable or […]

Studies that look for an association between a genetic variant and a trait are often inconsistent, finding an association in some studies or some populations, but not others. This could be for a number of reasons– small samples sizes, heterogeneity, or difficulty quantifying the trait, among other things. Or it could simply be that there’s […]

Both the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times report on the new X Prize Challenge: The X Prize Foundation, sponsor of a widely noted 2004 award for developing a reusable rocket suitable for private space travel, says it is now teaming with a wealthy Canadian geologist to offer $10 million to any team that […]

Via Dienekes comes this preprint [pdf] of a paper arguing for an ongoing recent selective sweep in the gene encoding myostatin, an inhibitor of muscle growth. The evidence for selection is based on resequencing of the gene in 146 people, which allows them to perform full-sequence-based tests for selection. They also look at the surrounding […]

The generation of data on biological functions has taken off exponentially in the past decade or so, and much of that is due to microarray technologies that allow thousands of experiments to be run in parallel. I love data, and the only thing that could possible entice me to get my hands wet in a […]

Narrowing down genes that play a role in cognition, bit by bit… 1. Way back when, in 2004, Bruce Lahn’s group published a paper arguing that nervous system genes, particularly neurodevelopmental genes, showed accelerated evolution in primates as compared to rodents. A new paper restricts the analysis to genes in a certain pathway– one involved […]

In the first comment on my last post, RPM brings up an interesting point, which I’m going to develop a little more here: First, let’s hypothesize that a non-protein-coding region of the genome is transcribed into some sort of functional RNA. As seen in the example of such an RNA on the left, the molecule […]

In the paper describing the discovery of Human Accelerated Region 1 (HAR1), an RNA gene expressed in the brain and apparently under selection along the human lineage, the authors allude to the method they used to identify this region of the genome. The paper describing what they did in more detail is in revision at […]

From a whole-genome tiling array study of transcription in Drosophila: Many animal and plant genomes are transcribed much more extensively than current annotations predict. However, the biological function of these unannotated transcribed regions is largely unknown. Approximately 7% and 23% of the detected transcribed nucleotides during D. melanogaster embryogenesis map to unannotated intergenic and intronic […]

A couple new papers review the factors that play a role in determining an individual’s epigenotype and the role of said epigenotype in the aetiology of autism spectrum disorders. We still do not understand the rules governing the establishment and maintenance of the epigenotype at any particular locus. The underlying DNA sequence itself and the […]

…here. Like the study Razib linked to a couple days ago, this one looks for signatures of selection in a number of genes suspected to play a role in the generation of natural human skin color variation. And also like the previous study, they find that different genes are implicated in derived light skin color […]

Both Coffee Mug and I have made a big deal out of the fact that a large percentage of the genome in eukaryotes is transcribed into RNA. In the comments, however, gc has been skeptical of inferring much from this fact, noting that the transcription machinery of the cell is inherently “leaky”. A new paper […]

To follow up on a previous post on determining the fraction of the human genome under selection (as well as Coffee Mug’s post on non-coding RNAs), here’s a paper which claims that, in raw numbers, more non-coding DNA has been under selection in humans than coding DNA. But still, using their method, based on the […]