A new paper in Nat Comm shows the power of natural human gene knockouts. Maybe the finding is not really novel but it finally proves the candidate genes – the most important asthma/allergy paper in the last 2 years!
This is even a nice addition to the most recent review of primary atopic disorders although IL33 is only depicted there in Fig 1.
23andMe is best known for selling DNA test kits, but the company’s real value lies in the data of its 5 million customers. The bigger its genetic database, the more insights 23andMe can glean from DNA. That, in turn, means the more it can tell customers about their ancestry and health and the more valuable the data it shares with academic scientists and sells to pharmaceutical companies for research. About 80 percent of 23andMe customers choose to participate in such research.
Bioprospecting are
companies pressured by legal uncertainties and unrealistic expectations of benefit-sharing are exploring alternative technologies rather than using natural products for drug R&D
which is a bit different from a welcome framework for Africa
In human genomics, there has been a push to ensure that research on samples collected in developing countries — particularly in Africa — is anchored in local science and community engagement. One example of this is the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) initiative, which is funded by the US National Institutes of Health and the London-based Wellcome Trust. Since 2012, it has funded genomics projects whose principal investigators are African, with several of the projects being managed locally from Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
correspondence nature genetics
Sir,
the era of modern allergy genetics started in 1997 with the Transatlantic Airway Conference at Key Biscayne, Florida. 20 years later, the paper of Ferreira et al. (1) marks the end of an era by reporting the largest study so far of asthma, „hay fever“ and atopic eczema in 180,000 cases. It is the result of an huge international effort of many named and unnamed scientists. Unfortunately, there are major impairments regarding scope of analysis, epidemiological and bioinformatics methods, interpretation and data release. Some issues even contradict nature genetics editorial policies (2), (3), (4). Continue reading Nature Genetics corrupted by 23andme
