Take a break from your holiday Netflix binge and learn something about recent breakthroughs in our understanding of human evolution from ancient DNA. John Hawks (UW Madison) is an excellent speaker and this talk is for non-experts. Get the whole family together to watch — it’s a treat to learn from one of the leading …
To quote James Lee, the first author listed below: “Shock and Awe” for those who doubt that cognitive ability is influenced by genetic variants. See work from a year ago: ~100 hits from 300k individuals. Now ~600 hits from 750k. (SNPs associated with EA are likely to also be associated with cognitive ability — see …
The second part of my project involves DNA extraction from my soil samples. For that, I travel to Nanjing and work in the lab of Dr. Fang Wang in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Soil Science Institute. Nanjing is only about an hour from Shanghai, which makes my presence much less of a novelty, as …
This is only the beginning. To serious people who read this blog, but may have been confused over the past 5+ years about things like missing heritability, genomic prediction, complex genetic architecture, gloomy prospects: isn’t it about time to consider updating your priors? Read all about it here. FT.com: Genetic scoring predicts how children do …
Sweat streams down my face as I climb the steep slope. My guide and I are at around 2,000 meters elevation, and it usually stays quite cool even in these summer months, but the sun is full blast today and the hike is arduous. The slope must be at least 60 degrees, and all four …
This WIRED article profiles Human Longevity, Inc., a genomics and machine learning startup led by Craig Venter. Its stated goal is to sequence 1 million people in the next few years. The figure above is an example of facial morphology prediction from DNA. Face recognition algorithms decompose a given face into a finite feature set …
This week we are considering a case from the back end of the food ethics continuum: the “devious defecator.” It concerns a legal finding against Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services, an Atlanta-based grocery distributor. It seems that Atlas was having a problem policing their warehouse. They could not positively identify the culprit named above, who …
Two groups (Zhang lab at MIT and Joung lab at Harvard) announce improved “engineered” Cas9 variants with reduced off-target editing rates while maintaining on-target effectiveness. I had heard rumors about this but now the papers are out. See CRISPR: Safe and Effective? Nature commentary Genome Editing: The domestication of Cas9. High-fidelity CRISPR–Cas9 nucleases with no …
Yesterday was my first day venturing into the field to collect fecal samples for later genetic analysis. I hope to conduct a non-invasive genetics survey of Wolong Nature reserve and the surrounding areas to determine movement patterns and population structure at a reserve-network scale and determine some of the effects of human development and protection …
This is a panel discussion of the documentary film DNA Dreams (see below), about BGI and its Cognitive Genomics Lab. DNA DREAMS Moderator: Dr. Evelynn Hammonds, Director of the Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science Panelists include: (L …
You can always blame the Chinese. See also A prudent path forward for genomic engineering and germline gene modification (Baltimore et al.) and Germ line editing and human evolution. Science: Embryo engineering alarm … In 1975, the Asilomar conference center hosted a meeting where molecular biologists, physicians, and lawyers crafted guidelines for research that altered …
The latest from the Reich lab at Harvard. The availability of ancient DNA allows for direct comparisons between ancestral and descendant populations. These methods will only become more powerful as technology and access to samples improve. Note the evidence for polygenic selection on height, over timescales of less than 10k years. (Fig. 3 from paper …
I believe the law stated below almost follows from the observation that humans brains are complex machines: hence the DNA blueprint has many components, and variance is spread over these components :^) However, note the evidence for discrete genetic modules of large effect in other species: Discrete genetic modules can control complex behavior (burrowing behavior in …
About 1% of the genome codes for actual proteins: these regions are the ~20k or so “genes” that receive most of the attention. (Usage of the term “gene” seems to be somewhat inconsistent, sometimes meaning “unit of heredity” or “coding region” or “functional region” …) There’s certainly much more biologically important information in the genome …
These new results probe surprisingly large variation in copy number (duplicated genomic segments) and its impact on gene expression. Earlier posts involving CNVs. Large multiallelic copy number variations in humans Nature Genetics (2015) doi:10.1038/ng.3200 Thousands of genomic segments appear to be present in widely varying copy numbers in different human genomes. We developed ways to …
The discussion in this video is sophisticated enough to make the distinction between embryo selection — the parents get a baby whose DNA originates from them, but the “best baby possible” — and active genetic editing, which can give the child genes that neither parent had.The movie GATTACA focuses on selection — the director made a …
It’s amazing what DNA analysis can discover. In the first time this technique was used for an Egyptian royal mummy, scientists found that King Tut had to use a cane to walk because he was frail and had a deformed foot, and he had multiple infections with malaria. This is the oldest genetic proof of …
A single nucleic acid change from adenosine to guanine (A to G) in “junk” DNA (DNA that scientists used to think wasn’t used for anything) reduces the activity of the KITLG gene. This single mutation has been found to change a brunette to a blonde. What’s interesting is the mutation doesn’t change skin color, eye …
This video has almost a million views. I think it’s very well done :-) Don’t forget to respond to the reader survey. Tweet
The khmer team is pleased to announce the release of khmer version 1.0. khmer is our software for working efficiently with fixed length DNA words, or k-mers, for research and work in computational biology. Links: khmer documentation PyPI link Announcement ChangeLog Citation handle khmer v1.0 is the culmination of about 9 months of development work …
Neanderthals shared a common ancestor with humans about 600,000 years ago, and didn’t go extinct until 30,000 years ago. Scientists have been able to reconstruct most of the Neanderthal genome using fossil fragments, and found that humans must have interbred with them in the past, since some DNA is similar between Neanderthals and modern-day Europeans …