mental retardation

Can't find your disease gene? Just sequence them all...

User Image dgmacarthur | April 21, 2009
A paper just published online in Nature Genetics describes a brute force approach to finding the genes underlying serious diseases in cases where traditional methods fall flat. While somewhat successful, the study also illustrates the paradoxical challenge of working with large-scale sequencing data: there are often too many possible disease variants, and it can be extremely difficult to work out which are actually causing the disease in question. The authors looked at 208 families where multiple members suffered from mental retardation and where the family history was consistent with the…