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Despite rapid advances in genomic technology, our ability to account for phenotypic variation using genetic information remains limited for many traits. This has unfortunately resulted in limited application of genetic data towards preventive and personalized medicine, one of the primary impetuses of genome-wide association studies. Recently, a large proportion of the “missing heritability” for human height was statistically explained by modeling thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms concurrently.

Natural selection exerts its influence by changing allele frequencies at genomic polymorphisms. Alleles associated with harmful traits decrease in frequency while those associated with beneficial traits become more common. In a simple case, selection acts on a trait controlled by a single polymorphism; a large change in allele frequency at this polymorphism can eliminate a deleterious phenotype from a population or fix a beneficial one.

News item in PLoS Genetics:

In recent years, several so-called next-generation DNA sequencing platforms have begun to challenge the well-established Sanger sequencing method. In two important ways—cost and speed—these next-gen technologies provide improvements over Sanger sequencing...

PLoS Genetics today has published five viewpoints relating to the safe use of GWAS study data.