Archive for 'Genomics' Category

Genomes Unzipped

If you haven’t, checked out the new weblog Genomes Unzipped. Familiar names & faces. The first posts are already must-reads, Testing for traces of Neanderthal in your own genome, and Personal genomics: the importance of sequencing.

“What has bioinformatics done for us”

So asks Anthony Goldbloom: A British bioinformatician asks what bioinformatics has ever done for us? Or put differently, what is the single greatest biological discovery made possible by bioinformatics? He is offering $USD100 to the person who puts forward the most compelling answer (the prize is small but the idea is to stoke discussion). Kaggle [...]

Jews and genetics

Over at Discover Blogs I have a very long post up on Jews & Genetics. In particular the recent paper in AJHG. One observation I have to make about Jewish genetics: when it comes to PCA plots which illustrate the relationship of Jews, in particular Ashkenazi Jews, to other populations I’ve noticed that two different [...]

Who are the living Neandertals?

I guess now we kind of know.

Natural selection and recombination

Razib has a nice discussion of an interesting observation just published in PLoS Genetics– that there is a negative correlation between recombination rate in the human genome and population differentiation. This observation, along with the complementary observations of correlations between nucleotide diversity and recombination and between nucleotide diversity and density of functional elements, form part [...]

Creative destruction in the personal genomics industry?

I’m hearing about rumblings at 23andMe, and not in a good way. The company made a big splash a few years ago, and came highly recommended by friends (e.g., “They know their science, and have a bottomless pool of money”). This story at BNET got my attention though, and confirmed what many have been hinting [...]

How long before the Y is incorporated into association studies?

I’ve been reading Sperm Biology: An Evolutionary Perspective; an engaging comparative look at, well, sperm biology. One fairly remarkable thing to me is that, while sperm evolve incredibly rapidly in morphology (at one point in the book, the claim is made that just about any animal can be distinguished visually by sperm cells alone[1]), the [...]

Defining “synthetic associations” down

David Goldstein and collegues report today the results of a genome-wide association study for a particular side effect (treatment-induced anemia) of treatment for hepatitis C. It turns out that variants in a single gene–ITPA–are overwhelmingly associated with the development of this side effect. This is a nice, probably clinically-important result, and there’s likely some interesting [...]