The growth of human genomics
The above figure is from Aylwyn Scally, or as I like to think of him, the Irish Matt Hahn. I’m not going to add any comments as the chart speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Also, looks like my son is about the 10,000th person in the history of the human race who was whole-genome sequenced. […]
The Ubiquitous Sequencing Age
Several years ago Yaniv Ehrlich published A Vision for Ubiquitous Sequencing. We’re inching in that direction. In The Atlantic Sarah Zhang has a piece, An Abandoned Baby’s DNA Condemns His Mother, while The New York Times just came out with, Old Rape Kits Finally Got Tested. 64 Attackers Were Convicted: Still, even with such successes, […]
Dreaming of billions of genomes
In the year 2000 scientists finished the draft of the complete human genome. The “reference” for what came after. Even ten years earlier some researchers were questioning the feasibility of any such project! In the early 1990s, many assumed it would be…
To understand Neanderthals we need to understand ourselves
In 2010 researchers sequenced the whole genome of a single Neanderthal. From comparing this genome to that of humans alive today they concluded, to their surprise, that many modern human populations had Neanderthal ancestry! More specifically, all popu…
Onward to 2019!
This was a big year for Insitome. Our three flagship products, Regional Ancestry, Neanderthal, and Metabolism, have been present in the Helix store for over a year. Over the next few months, we plan on upgrading and rolling out changes. One of the aspe…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 10: 2018 in genomics
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 10: 2018 in genomicsThis week we reviewed the “big stories” in 2018 in genomics. There were a lot of possibilities, but we narrowed down the list.First, we discussed Neanderthal art. And, it’s ramifications fo…
The year personal genomics got personal
The data for the above chart was assembled from press reports of various personal genomic companies with a public profile. So the values act as lower bounds. Additionally, the total numbers are from a comment in Genome Biology that I coauthored in the …
Laws of engineering are meant to be broken
A reader pointed out a very interesting passage in Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution on the future possibilities of genome sequencing. Since the book was published in the middle of 2009, it is quite possible the passage was written in 2008, or even earlier. Unfortunately for Dawkins’ prognostication track-record, […]
The crash of the cost of genome sequencing
It’s been a wild 10 years. There’s a reason that data compression companies are a big thing in genomics now.
Reflections on ASHG Meeting 2018
Another meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics has come and gone. I’ve been going since 2012, and so want to post some observations of how things have changed. This is a big conference. From less than 1,000 people in the late 1970s to nearly…
On the whole genomics will not be individually transformative…for now
A new piece in The Guardian, ‘Your father’s not your father’: when DNA tests reveal more than you bargained for, is one of the two major genres in writings on personal genomics in the media right now (there are exceptions). First, there is the genre where genetics doesn’t do anything for you. It’s a waste […]
Sequence them all and let God sort it out!
Researchers reboot ambitious effort to sequence all vertebrate genomes, but challenges loom: In a bid to garner more visibility and support, researchers eager to sequence the genomes of all vertebrates today officially launched the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), releasing 15 very high quality genomes of 14 species. But the group remains far short of raising […]
The “X” in the sex chromosome
There are ~3 billion base pairs in the human genome. Of that ~5% are in the X chromosome. The X is fully functional, unlike the famously hamstrung Y. It harbors one of the longest genes in the human genome, DMD, at 2,300,000 base pairs. In contrast, th…
DNA, from genetics to genomics
In the early 1950s scientists established that the molecular structure of DNA was a double helix. The had discovered the physical substrate of heredity. With this discovery the field of molecular genetics was born (and eventually a Nobel Prize given!)….
Apes just being apes
A while back I made from of bonobos and chimpanzees for being kind of losers for looking across at each other on either side of the Congo river for ~1.5 million years the time elapsed since their diversion. I finally ended up reading the paper from last year, Chimpanzee genomic diversity reveals ancient admixture with […]
Selection swimming against the genomic tide
One of the major issues that confuses people is that the distribution of a trait or gene is often only weakly correlated with overall phylogeny and the rest of the genome. To give a strange but classic example, the MHC loci are subject to strong balancing selection. This means that novel alleles do not substitute […]
Quantitative genomics, adaptation, and cognitive phenotypes
The human brain utilizes about ~20% of the calories you take in per day. It’s a large and metabolically expensive organ. Because of this fact there are lots of evolutionary models which focus on the brain. In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Richard Wrangham suggests that our need for calories to feed our […]
The future will be genetically engineered
If the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes had come out a few years later I believe there would have been mention of CRISPR. Sometimes science leads to technology, and other times technology aids in science. On occasion the two are one in the same. The plot I made above shows that in […]
Genome sequencing for the people is near
When I first began writing on the internet genomics was an exciting field of science. Somewhat abstruse, but newly relevant and well known due to the completion of the draft of the human genome. Today it’s totally different. Genomics is ubiquitous. Instead of a novel field of science, it is transitioning into a personal technology. […]
Reason is but a slave of passions as it always has been
David Hume stated that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” I don’t know about the ought part, that’s up for debate. But the is part seems empirically true. The reasons people give for this or that is often just a post hoc rationalization. To give a different twist to […]