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Prototype or Boondoggle? Too Close to Call

Oct 13, 2009

The Gene Sherpa follows up on news that Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco, won a $24.8 million NIH grant to use data and biospecimens from 100,000 Kaiser members in a large-scale study of the health implications of genetic and environmental interactions. Blogger Steve Murphy posits that this could "serve as a prototype" for the kind of biobank Francis Collins has advocated, but cautions that "this will be a huge boondoggle unless done very, very carefully."

Breaking News
The Scan

Gone, But Now Reconstructed SARS-CoV-2 Genomes

In a preprint, a researcher describes his recovery of viral sequences that had been removed from a common database.

Rare Heart Inflammation Warning

The Food and Drug Administration is adding a warning about links between a rare inflammatory heart condition and two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, Reuters reports.

Sandwich Sampling

The New York Times sent tuna sandwiches for PCR analysis.

Nature Papers Describe Gut Viruses, New Format for Storing Quantitative Genomic Data, More

In Nature this week: catalog of DNA viruses of the human gut microbiome, new dense depth data dump format to store quantitative genomic data, and more.