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Useless?

Jan 26, 2010

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.”

Breaking News
The Scan

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Genome Research Papers on IPAFinder, Structural Variant Expression Effects, Single-Cell RNA-Seq Markers

In Genome Research this week: IPAFinder method to detect intronic polyadenylation, influence of structural variants on gene expression, and more.