Legacy of a candidate gene and replication in genomics
During the 1990s and early 2000s, many human geneticists and other scientists (especially psychologists) tried to study the genetics of human traits by follo...
All posts tagged with genetics
The naming of X and Y
The Scientist this month has a nice short article by Joseph Keierleber that recounts some of the early history of scientific investigation of the sex chromos...
Notable: Alzheimer’s risk and genetic background of ApoE
Notable paper: Rajabli F, Feliciano BE, Celis K, Hamilton-Nelson KL, Whitehead PL, Adams LD, et al. (2018) Ancestral origin of ApoE ε4 Alzheimer disease ris...
Genetic flatlining of island foxes
Carl Zimmer’s article on “Foxes That Endure Despite a Lack of Genetic Diversity” is interesting and useful:
Variation in cognitive traits and genetics
A new study of more than 50,000 people has identified some of the genetic variations that underlie cognitive variation among middle-aged and older adults (Da...
Looking more deeply at a study of obesity and genetic risk
Late in December, Carl Zimmer described a research study showing that a famous gene that influences obesity in living Americans, called FTO, has actually inc...
The three-color primates
The Scientist has a nice article about the evolution of trichromatic vision in primates: “The Rainbow Connection”. Trichromacy in anthropoid primates is a gr...
Alzheimer's long read
The New York Times has a powerful story about the genetics of early onset Alzheimer’s disease, by Gina Kolata: “An Alzheimer’s gene: one family’s saga”.
Making Big Data work in genetics
Laura Clarke and colleagues report on the data access and management practices of the 1000 Genomes Project Clarke:1000:2012.
A story of methemoglobinemia
A story by Susan Donaldson James of a unique genetic disorder and the social stigma of inbreeding in Appalachia: “Fugates of Kentucky: Skin Bluer than Lake L...
Is Nature Genetics something more than the GWAS Catalog?
I always look through the table of contents of Nature Genetics, which I have delivered to my inbox. Over the last couple of years, the journal has included a...
Genetic variation and the Hardy-Weinberg proportions
The fundamental information about genetics for any individual is her genotype — the alleles that she has. But genes in populations can be considered in other...
What does it mean for a trait to be heritable?
Tall people tend to have tall parents. The height of the body, called stature, is one of the most obvious phenotypic traits in human populations. Anyone who ...
Genetic drift
If everyone in a population lived a long life, mated, and reproduced absolutely equally (two offspring per person), then the population size would never chan...
Genetic variation and the Hardy-Weinberg formula
The fundamental information about genetics for any individual is her genotype. The genotype for a single genetic locus is simply a list of two alleles, wheth...
Blueprints and recipes
Greg Mayer has a post on preformationism and epigenesis on the Why Evolution Is True blog:“Development is epigenetic”.
A large mystery in historical genetics
Gina Kolata writes an interesting story about the genetics of a pituitary giant (“New Story Writ by a Giant’s DNA”). The individual in question is a man know...
Genetic bike path
Eva Amsen describes her trip down the BRCA2 cycle path, near the Sanger Institute in the UK. She also points to Jennifer Rohn’s description of the path last...
Heritability and genetic test essay
Neuroscientist Dorothy Bishop provides a student-level opinion piece in the Guardian that addresses the “missing heritability” problem without using the term...
Genetic lapidaries
Nature News has a short piece on yesterday’s Desmond Tutu and other South African genomes: “Africa yields two full human genomes.”
Website review: Learn.Genetics
This week’s Science is featuring an essay by the first winners of the “SPORE” competition, the team behind the Learn.Genetics and Teach.Genetics websites. Ev...
Genetics of brain surface area and cortical thickness
The field of brain imaging has progressed remarkably during the past several years. I follow the literature because as the study of heritability of brain str...
"For the time being, Mr. Gretzky is still using his brain."
Benedict Carey describes the live online dissection of the brain of Henry Molaison (“Building a Search Engine of the Brain, Slice by Slice”). There’s a lot o...
Blood reboot
I pointed out the new treatment protocol for the sickle cell trait last week. In the interest of complete coverage of hemoglobinopathies, I’ll link to Scienc...
Sickle cell chimeras
Many of us use sickle cell as an example in classes. I always do so while noting the progress that has been made in treating the condition in Westernized con...
Driving genes
Oh, oh…
The Finnish line
A new paper by Jukka Palo and colleagues investigates the population history of Finland:
Today's Europeans different from Paleolithic and Neolithic predecessors
Dienekes, on a new study of early Neolithic and earlier mtDNA variation in Europe:
Hunting a myostatin SNP-phenotype association
I happened to be reading some literature on myostatin today and ran across a recent paper (Kostek et al., 2009). Conclusion: MSTN ...
Worm longevity and the germline
Nicholas Wade writes about experiments that link germline gene regulation to life extension in C. elegans:
A little rewilding
Here’s a Reuters story about attempts to bring back aurochsen and introduce them to Britain. Aurochsen are now extinct in the wild, the last having died in 1...
Searching for the genetics of identical twinning
This week, Nature is carrying a news feature by David Cyranoski, which profiles Bruno Reversade, a geneticist trying to find genetic causes of identical twin...
The trouble with contamination
A case in Germany illustrates how easy it can be for contamination to sneak into labs from unexpected sources:
Why biologists should care about math
I’d like to point readers to James Crow’s article in the open access Journal of Biology. Titled, “Mayr, mathematics and the study of evolution,” it’s a brief...
"That kind of stuff goes over well in sociology"
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long article about the tentative pairing of genetics and sociology. The occasion for the article is a recent issue of...
The classical model of the gene and information contrasts
There has been much wringing of hands about the definition of the term “gene.” The worries aren’t new, but they have become a topic this week because of a NY...
Quote: James Crow, genetics then and now
James F. Crow, in the conclusion to his great article in the current Annual Review of Genetics, in which he reflects on a personal history of empirical appro...