Although this blog is not very technology centered, I have a great passion for human powered vehicles. Being a long-time owner of a recumbent bike and having a strong interest in ecology, I would certainly (Show me more…)

but repeats in the human genome are not such impressive. Instead they create a lot of trouble when situated in the close proximity to genes. Think of Huntingtons disease, myotonic dystrophy, fragile X or some ataxias. The human genome sequence paper already had a chapter (Show me more…)

An excellent new review summarizes our current knowledge about telomeres – the complicated chromosome end machinery that is necessary to prevent unwanted repair while allowing to track for the number of replications. Think of it like a source code control system as CVS, the Concurrent Version System. During a recent research project on life cycle of single point mutations / SNPs I realized (Show me more…)

I had the chance to install now the new PLINK GWAS software for a further analysis of recently published ORMDL3 asthma data. It seems that PLINK is some software that I was looking for a long time (paper link|download link). There are great and foolproof functions to check the validity of your data. I discovered for example unnoticed stratification in the German case-control sample by first and second component of the MDS analysis (Show me more…)