Tag Archives: Genetics + Biology

A hitch in the glitch of the switch

The CD14 / allergy story never ends – after many years and numerous contradictory reports. A new comment in the AJRCCM concludes that “further research is required” – at this time “research into the area of gene-by-environment interaction where large-scale studies, advanced assessment of environmental exposure of and experimental investigations of interactions are needed”. Is there any sense with neverending loops (except playground for hamster)? Nay, nay.

How deep is deep enough?

In case that the common disease / common variant is leading to nirvana, we urgently need to resequence common genes in large populations. 2kb long CRP is a particular good candidate which might be a reason why Crawford from Uwash resequenced ~500 individuals. They found indeed potentially relevant codings SNPs – of course rare (<1%) but they are there! There is a greater number in African-Americans than other populations and more than half are private to a single population (BTW more than half in dbSNP can not be validated). Of course tag SNPs would not discover them. Yea, yea.

Again paranormal inheritance?

Following the exciting Lolle paper, now again non-chromosomal transfer of genetic information in a new study of Mary Alleman. Yes, of course, humans inherit mito DNa, there is imprinting, but also siRNA (not found in maize) or RNA polymerases (found!)? BTW much fuss of maternal imprinting in genetic epidemiology is simply preferential maternal reporting.

Addendum

Pollen contamination may have been the reason for the Lolle/Pruitt results.