Small genetic effects do not preclude drug development
Daniel MacArthur points me to a Newsweek article on the bankruptcy of Decode Genetics. The author describes (one of) Decode’s problems like this:The genetics of illness turned out to be more complex than researchers expected. At deCODE and elsewhere, t…
Homo erectus and EDAR?
In Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne has the following parenthetical aside about population variation in morphology in H. erectus:(H. erectus from China…had shovel-shaped incisor teeth not found in other populations) This stopped me dead in my track…
“Synthetic associations” and sickle cell anemia
Last week, I made a silly error in describing a problem in the sickle cell anemia example given by Dickson et al. (2010) as an empirical example of the phenomenon they call “synthetic association”. So allow me to take a mulligan, and re-try this:The au…
A bold prediction: “synthetic associations” are not a panacea
There’s a bit of press surrounding the interesting result from David Goldstein’s group that, in certain situations, a number of “rare” (defined as an allele frequency less than 5% [1]) variants influencing a trait can lead to an association signal at “…
Localizing recent positive selection in humans using multiple statistics
Online this week in Science, a group presents a method for identifying genes under positive selection in humans, and gives some examples. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this paper, for reasons I’ll get to, but here’s their basic idea:Readers of t…
PRDM9 and the evolution of recombination hotspots
This week in Science, three papers report that the product of the gene PRDM9 is an important determinant of where recombination occurs in the genome during meiosis. Though this may sound like something of an esoteric discovery, it’s actually pretty rem…
Mutation and selection in stickleback evolution
Understanding the precise molecular mechanisms underlying changes in animal morphology is a tricky problem–usually two species which have diverged morphologically (say, mice and humans) are now so unrelated as to make genetic study exceedingly difficu…