Copy number & common variants

Science News has an interesting piece up, Shared Differences: The architecture of our genomes is anything but basic. The main focus is on genetic variation, the possibility that there might be important information in copy number variance, and that the common disease-common variant hypothesis is dead. At least for complex traits that we're interested in like schizophrenia. If any of this is unfamiliar or confusing, I recommend the article, it even has references to the primary literature that you can follow up on.

More like this

The Institute for Creation Research has a charming little magazine called "Acts & Facts" that prints examples of their "research" — which usually means misreading some scientific paper and distorting it to make a fallacious case for a literal interpretation of the bible. Here's a classic…
Imagine that there is a trait observed among people that seems to occur more frequently in some families and not others. One might suspect that the trait is inherited genetically. Imagine researchers looking for the genetic underpinning of this trait and at first, not finding it. What might you…
Interesting research coming out of Arizona State University: Researchers believe that dynamic regions of the human genome -- "hotspots" in terms of duplications and deletions -- are potentially involved in the rapid evolution of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are genetically…
Curious about height? Check out this new paper in Nature Genetics, A common variant of HMGA2 is associated with adult and childhood height in the general population. Nature News has a nice report for public consumption. Last week when I posted about heritable traits I used height as an…

"went extinct" is nice, but not as good as my wife's favourite - "The rats exhibited a 100% mortality response".

By bioIgnoramus (not verified) on 11 Apr 2009 #permalink