genetics of gene expression
dgmacarthur | May 8, 2009It's difficult to distill down a meeting as data-rich as the Cold Spring Harbor Biology of Genomes meeting, but here's a first-pass attempt.
We're sequencing lots of peopleOne of the highlights of the meeting was the update on progress from the 1000 Genomes (1KG) Project. I was fortunate enough to have been given a sneak peek at the data at the 1KG satellite meeting earlier in the week (which you can download yourself if you're so inclined), but it was still impressive to see it all put together in the presentation today by Goncalo Abecasis.
Abecasis reported on the data emerging from the…
dgmacarthur | April 2, 2009GenomeWeb Daily News points to a new funding opportunity from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) for researchers interested in studying the link between genetic variants and variation in the expression levels of genes.
This is an incredibly important area of research. Genome-wide association studies have recently uncovered vast numbers of DNA regions linked to common diseases (the latest estimate I've heard suggests around 400 common genetic variants associated with 75 different diseases or traits) - but we still don't have a clue how the majority of these regions actually alter…
dgmacarthur | December 8, 2008I was planning to write a long article on this recent paper in PLoS Genetics, but p-ter at Gene Expression and G at Popgen ramblings have both covered the central message very well.
So if you haven't read those articles, already, go and do so now - when you come back, I want to talk about the potentially worrying implications of this paper for the future of personal genomics.
There's really only two pieces of jargon you need to know to follow this story, and those are the two classes of genetic variants that alter the expression levels of genes: cis and trans variants. To put it simply, cis…
dgmacarthur | November 3, 2008One of the major challenges of the personal genomic era will be knowing exactly which (if any) of the millions of genetic variants present in your genome are likely to actually have an impact on your health. Such predictions are particularly problematic for regulatory variants - genetic changes that alter the expression levels of genes, rather than the sequence of the protein they encode. A paper out in PLoS Genetics this week goes some way towards solving this problem by giving researchers a much better idea of exactly where they need to look for these variants.
The paper
The paper draws on…