Connection Between Epigenome, Selective Mutability, Evolution, and Human Disease
Li, Harris et al., PLoS Genetics
Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine and elsewhere propose a "connection between the epigenome, selective mutability, evolution, and human disease" based on the findings of their study on associations of structural mutability with germline DNA methylation and with non-allelic homologous recombination mediated by low-copy repeats. "Combined evidence from four human sperm methylome maps, human genome evolution, structural polymorphisms in the human population, and previous genomic and disease studies consistently points to a strong association of germline hypomethylation and genomic instability," the Baylor-led team writes.
A Few Hundred Genomes in Your Pocket
Victorinox, makers of the world-famous Swiss Army Knife, have, surprisingly, been the first to offer a 1TB USB stick — the world's largest thumb drive. The USB stick comes with either just the thumb drive on its own or with a pair of scissors and a knife. The drive can be accessed via USB 2.0 and 3.0 or eSATA, has AES 256-bit ascription, and has a 48 x 96 dot monochrome LCD display with room enough to provide a device label or some indicator of the drive's contents.
The thumb drive, which was exhibited at this week's CES conference in Las Vegas, comes with a price tag of $2,000, so if you're the type of person who is apt to misplace their car keys often, you might want to skip this one.
In theory, you could stick roughly 340 human genomes on this drive — not including annotations and other data of course — which begs the question: Could snail mail as a data transfer method for research collaborations make a comeback? It would be a lot cheaper to send some USBs in a box compared with a crate of disk arrays or hard drives, and possibly quicker than uploading data to the cloud.
These USBs also sport some pretty formidable security. The drive immediately emails its owner if plugged into an unauthorized computer and if no reply is received from the owner, zaps the flash memory and deletes the data.
I do believe the cloud, such
I do believe the cloud, such as dropbox, would still be much quicker and more efficient (and definitely less expensive) for transferring genomes, depending upon the speed of the internet connection.