Human Genetic Variation Alters Anthrax Toxin Sensitivity
Martchenko, Candille et al., PNAS
Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine show that genetic variation affecting capillary morphogenesis gene 2, or CMG2, dramatically alters toxin sensitivity in humans. In its analysis, the team reports on "a CMG2 single-nucleotide polymorphism occurring frequently in African and European populations [that they found] independently altered toxin uptake." The group goes on to suggest "testing of genomically characterized human cell populations may offer a broadly useful strategy for elucidating effects of genetic variation on infectious disease susceptibility."
But You'll Have to Make Your Own Mai Tai
October 22, 2009
ASHG already has quite a following on Twitter, where attendees have been tweeting about the quality of the parties as well as interesting bits of people's talks. "Shendure filtered common variants, applied mult filters, showed they could ID culprit in a known Mendelian disorder. Impressive," tweets nparmalee. In another tweet, dnatestindex writes, "C. Bustamante: the majority of genetic variants found in resequencing studies are only found in one individual."
And if you prefer to get information in more-than-140-character chunks, Luke Jostins at Genetic Inference blogs about the rare variant and 1,000 Genomes sessions from the first day of the conference. For the former, he writes, "A common theme that came up across in all the talks was that population demographic effects become more powerful for rare variants." And for the latter, he notes, "We have yet to show a unified set of uses of the 1000 Genomes data that gives a set of real significant biological findings. For the moment, the 1000 Genomes Project seems to be brimming with potential, but we can’t wait forever for this to crystallize into science."
Andrea Anderson from our sister site GenomeWeb Daily News is also at ASHG, and offers a news report on the 1,000 Genomes session as well.