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Articles tagged Genomics
(73 results)
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Mapping granny: ancestry inference for admixed individuals
Like all biological populations, human groups can’t be neatly divided. Real populations are connected to each other, and their borders are blurred by migration and mixing. But when inferring ancestry of an individual from genetic data, populations are typically simplified into tidy, discrete units. In the December issue of G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, Yang et al. describe…
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ASHG Meeting Report: A guide to the Exome Aggregation Consortium data
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…
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Bat signals: genomic traces of sensory rewiring
How does evolution rewire an animal’s sensory system? In time for both National Bat Week and Halloween, new research in G3 investigates this question by comparing the genomes of bat species that “see” the world in different ways. The black flying fox Pteropus alecto forages for fruit mainly by smell and sight. In contrast, the…
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More Bang for your GWAS Buck
For genome-wide association studies, data is power. The more data you have, the more statistical power you wield to find genetic associations. But are there ways to get more from the data you already have? In the May issue of GENETICS, Kaufman and Rosset describe a testing framework that substantially boosts the power of genome-wide…
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Neanderthal Relations: Interbreeding or Ancestral Structure?
In Eurasia, humans once had Neanderthals for neighbors. That time of co-existence seems to have left its marks in our genome; non-Africans today share more genetic variants with Neanderthals than Africans do. But does this really mean there was interbreeding between humans and the Hominids next door? Some have previously proposed an alternative explanation for that…
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New Fish on the Block
The medaka, or Japanese rice fish, is a century-old genetic model on the rise again. Long studied by scientists in Japan, it has been rediscovered by the wider research community over the last decade as a flexible tool for vertebrate genetics. Part of the appeal is the medaka’s amenability to inbreeding. In the latest issue…
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Assembling a Colossus
The loblolly pine genome is big. Bloated with retrotransposons and other repetitive sequences, it is seven times larger than the human genome and easily big enough to overwhelm standard genome assembly methods. This forced the loblolly pine genome sequencing team, led by David Neale at the University of California, Davis, to look for ways to…