Seeing red

Pop sci article about color vision

Inner Life of a Cell

cool new animation illustrating what happens at the cellular level.

Ozzy's genes

This would have been a good dissertation topic . . .

New review paper on MITF

worth keeping in mind for white-patches paper...

Another cool GWAS study--this one on longevity

The authors of this PNAS article found that members of the general population living past age 85 do not have fewer disease risk alleles (coronary diseases, cancer, diabetes) than a random sample of young adults. We have to keep looking for the answer to healthy longevity...

Move over hormones, make some space for direct genetic effects!

As a "hormone person," I found this quite interesting! Some sex differences are not mediated by hormones, but rather by direct genetic effects--for example, on the midbrain dopaminergic system.

Multivariate Selection Theory in Primatology

Rich's new paper in the Open Anthropology Journal provides a nice review of quantitative genetics.

Personalized Epigenomics

soon it will be EWAS instead of GWAS...

epigenetics on the dad's side

A new study in Nature (Ng et al) shows evidence that the father's diet (prior to conception) can affect his offsprings' health. -- perfect timing given our recent lab meeting conversation

mRNA from hair and disease (Usher syndrome)

"mRNA extracted from hair roots is a potentially powerful and convenient tool for mutation analysis in USH-causing genes'

Genomics' X prize

the $10 million prize for 10 genomes in 10 days for $10,000 .... getting close to a winner, but the question is the QC judging...

Emily & Andrew's Baringo work highlight of SVP

Nice little Ann Gibbons plug in Science NewsFocus.

genotyping CNVs

new approaching using short reads (another useful tangent from the 1000 genomes project)

Science special issue on epigenetics

already flagged by Tim, but worth also linking to the ToC of this science issue -- perhaps articles on small RNAs and prions of later interest...

Gene patents ...perhaps no more

This will be a good debate topic for ANTH204

"Friday the U.S. Department of Justice issued a brief saying that the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 should never have been patented."

1000 Genomes Project

The first major paper from the project was published last week in Nature.

So now we supposed have 94% of human variable sites documented -- including the identification of many 'rare variants'.

An interest snippet from the Nature News article:

"results of the survey revealed, with each person's genome carrying some 250 or 300 so-called 'loss-of-function' mutations that incapacitate the gene in which they occur.

"That's quite a lot — it's on the order of 1% of all genes," says Richard Durbin, a genomicist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, and one of the chief architects of the project."

Plague Origins & Epidemiology Across China, Europe, and Africa

Interesting review of the distribution of plague strains across the west, with their origins - "'The likely origin of the plague in China has nothing to do with its people or crowded cities,' Dr. Achtman said. 'The bacterium has no interest in people, whom it slaughters by accident. Its natural hosts are various species of rodent such as marmots and voles, which are found throughout China.'"