Oct 12, 2007

From Shiu Lab

Nature and Nature Genetics

1) Promoter regions of many neural and nutrition related genes have undergone positive selection in human evolution

They looked at the zeta, the ratio of substitutions in cis regions to intronic regions across many genes, and then classified genes using PANTHER classification. They have used chimpanzee as a relative and macaque as an outgroup.

2) Recombination and linkage disequilibrium in Arabidopsis thaliana

These guys generated a map that can be used for further LD mapping. They used 19 accessions oligonuc 1bp tile data and resequencing data from 20 accessions and did an LD analysis of that using some softwares. Estimated stuff like recombination hotspots, population recombination rates, LD decay on a local and expanded level etc.

3) An Arabidopsis haplotype map takes root

Comment on the earlier article

4) Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation

The paper shows that the copy numbers of Amylase gene in human societies that consume more starchy foods are higher than the societies that dont. They used qPCR to estimate copies of AMY1 gene, and validated it using Fiber FISH (Direct observation)

5) Discovery of expression QTLs using large-scale transcriptional profiling in human lymphocytes

This group looked at whole genome transcript profiles of some 1200 individuals, fished out the genes that showed high abundance, placed them at a location on the genome, and looked at the polymorphisms in the cis-regulatory region associated with that gene, in every person. They found that some polymorphisms are linked to the gene and these, they propose, could be further targets of study.

6)NG Question of the Year

Constructing an ontogenetic tree of the human body

>>>>Back to Journal Review 07-0928