Surfing into the genomic future
The decline in cost per genomeWithin genomics circles, the chart above illustrating the crash in sequencing costs since the year 2000 is famous. The reason it is famous is that it shows that genomic technology began to outrun the famous “Moore’s Law”, …
What did modern humans look like during the “Out of Africa” event?
Recently I was having an email exchange with a friend (a prominent public intellectual who is not a scientist), and we were thinking about what “ancestral Africans” looked like. More precisely, the populations which were resident around ~100,000 to ~200,000 years before the present. These are the people who are depicted in paleoanthropology documentaries. Here […]
The architecture of skin color variation in Africa
Very interesting abstract at the ASHG meeting of a plenary presentation,Novel loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations. This is clearly the work that one of the comments on this weblog alluded to last summer during SMBE. There I was talking about the likely introduction of the derived SLC24A5 variant to the Khoisan peoples […]
How many human genomes have been sequenced?
That query doesn’t seem to have an easy answer on Google, so I’m trying to enter it here. A prominent genomicist asserted a ballpark figure of ~30,000 human genomes in the year 2011. Most of that is in the year 2011 itself. Also, in regards to the “$1,000 genome” question, it seems that some labs […]