Copy number & common variants

Science News has an interesting piece up, Shared Differences: The architecture of our genomes is anything but basic. The main focus is on genetic variation, the possibility that there might be important information in copy number variance, and that the common disease-common variant hypothesis is dead. At least for complex traits that we're interested in like schizophrenia. If any of this is unfamiliar or confusing, I recommend the article, it even has references to the primary literature that you can follow up on.

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David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke, has critiqued the current focus on large-scale genomwide associations before. Now he is taking to the next step, as his group has a paper out which suggests that the reason that association studies have been relatively unfruitful in terms of bang-for-buck is…
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"went extinct" is nice, but not as good as my wife's favourite - "The rats exhibited a 100% mortality response".

By bioIgnoramus (not verified) on 11 Apr 2009 #permalink