In a simulation study in PLoS Biology, Duke University’s David Goldstein and colleagues say that signals seen in genome-wide association studies that appear to come from common variants disease-causing variants may actually be emanating from rare variants. As the New York Times points out, “the association is not exactly spurious — Dr. Goldstein calls it ‘synthetic’ — but it is indirect, so much so as to make many SNPs useless for identifying the genes that cause disease.” At Genomeboy, Misha Angrist writes that there’s two things to do: “read it and weep” and then “buy stock in sequencing companies.”
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