Community Voices

Male Drosophila fruit flies perform an elaborate ritual when they court a female. The male first turns towards the female, follows her, taps her, vibrates his wings to produce a species-specific song, licks her genitalia, curves his abdomen toward her and, if all goes well, the pair finally copulate. These complex routines may help flies…

With genomic data from hundreds of thousands of people accumulating, geneticists are now able to mine these data for very rare, but very informative genetic variants, including loss-of-function alleles. For example, across the enormous “reference set” of human exomes announced at the 2014 American Society for Human Genetics Meeting, on average there’s a variant every six bases. In the first of our reports from the ASHG…