False Memory
The German magazine Spiegel has a nice paper about the false memory debate and the “implanted” memory of events that never happened. They cite Hans Markowitsch from Bielefeld that the autobiographical memory is not very good in recalling past events, being much much more adapted to orientation of current and future events. Has anyone examined blogs and if their content can be recalled by the author? Nai, nai.
Once again genetic testing
I have argued earlier that the free decision of an individual to allow genetic testing, will also reveal data on genetic relatives that have never consented to that procedure.
A new review by Bruce Weir now confirms that “it is reasonably straightforward to find the probability of the genotypes of individuals when their relationship is known…” My current work lets me also assume that with 500,000 SNP data at hand, much individual characteristics of the donor can be reconstructed – there are no anonymous DNAs datasets as some people still believe.
I even fear that genetic testing will increase for example in “homeless” (in vitro fertilized) individuals as these people will want to prevent sibling marriage – see for example the a-China DNA project. Other people may be curious about their genealogy, others about drug side effect prediction, lifestyle, assurance questions…
With every new dataset, available datasets will gradually decrease their anonymity level. I fear that anonymity is not so much a dichotomous property, it is much more a likelihood ratio to stay unknown under the probability to be known. Yea, yea.
Addendum
Time online of Dec 17, 2006 reports that the British police is holding the DNA records of more than 1m innocent people — eight times more than ministers have previously admitted. I wonder if this will affect participation rate of the UK Biobank that targets health of lifestyle, environment and genes in 500,000 people.
Sleep well
Just came to my attention that there is research of sleep related genes, the usual stuff of protein kinases, dopaminergic receptor, and serotonine transporter. Also this research community seem to have the common difficulty of the complex disease gene mappers – to understand a phenomenon (not a trait) as systemic function, an intrinsic property of a multicellular and multiwired brain, yea, yea.
Addendum
More strange phenotypes orgasm frequency, pain, human memory performance.
Addendum
Read also the what-we-could-have-learned-from-linkage-studies.
Heritable mutation or not?
moblog – Tsun Leung Chan is now reporting a heritable germline epimutation of MSH2 in a family with hereditary colorectal cancer another case of “paranormal” inheritance. They find a mosaic germline methylation pattern (which might even be a symptom of another mutation that affects the demethylation-de novo methylation pattern of MSH2 during embryogenesis?). If my hypothesis is true these families should even show more genes with different methylation patterns, yea, yea.
Addendum 28/5/08
Another attempt to answer this question comes by a study of the MLH1 promotor
Pro: MLH1 promoter methylation was found in a patient and his mother giving evidence for a familial predisposition for an epimutation in MLH1. Contra: a de novo set-up of methylation in one patient, a mosaic or incomplete methylation pattern in six patients, and no evidence for inheritance of MLH1 promoter methylation in the remaining families.
Science projects, glue projects
Reading about science projects, glue projects and platform projects, all with minority, gender, public communication and ethics modules while including large administrative overheads, travel and meeting costs, I even wonder how much money is finally going to real research – careful experimentation and thoughtful interpretation. Some people seem to spend more time on creating logos than in study design, yea, yea.
What could have been learned from linkage studies
What makes the difference between genetic linkage and association studies? Simply speaking, for linkage you need to inherit a particular marker allele from your parents where it does not matter if a child in another family inherits another allele (pending it shares it with its affected sibling). With association studies this matters.
As we found with the much relaxed linkage strategy so many minor diverse loci, I assume a rather heterogeneous origin of complex diseases. There is no doubt about the importance of genes, but about the sharing of the same genetic abnormality. An (anonymous) position paper on basic Asthma Research Strategy II in Clin Exp All 2006; 36: 1326 says
The average size of effect on asthma and related traits from common SNPs is small. For instance, seven common SNPs in the IL13 gene jointly accounted for only 0,5% of the variance of total IgE … With a heritability of circa 60% for total IgE this implies that hundreds of genes, each with small effects, may be involved in IgE regulation.
Families presenting with a complex system disease will all have unique patterns how they arrive at the same clinical endpoint. Alpha-delta-gamma asthma, theta-kappa-jota schizophrenia or $%&# diabetes – are they combining lets say 3000 variations in 300 genes of 30 metabolic-signalling pathways to 1 disease of variable onset, severity and prognosis? Yea, yea.
Free for all
A report describing some first experience with GWAs (that means genomewide association studies by single nucleotide polymorphism) is listing several websites that will offer soon public data
- Hapmap [available]
- CEPH [available]
- Affymetrix 500 K Hapmap [available]
- a Parkinson study [available]
- GAIN [forthcoming]
- Wellcome Trust [forthcoming]
- NIH [forthcoming]
- Affymetrix reference set Affymetrix / IKMB Kiel / Erasmus Medisch Centrum / Karolinska Institutet / Centre National de Génotypage [forthcoming]
- CGEMS
There are many opportunities to do research without ever writing a grant application, yea, yea.
Addendum
A German paper gives some updates – you may also check www.p3gconsortium.org and www.wtccc.org.
A zebra takes its stripes wherever it goes
This week ends with another African proverb and some thoughts on transcription factor binding sites.
Commenting on the work of Janssens that “there is no inherent reason that CRMs [cis regulatory modules] must lie on a contiguous segment of DNA or that they must contain clusters of sites”, Halfon still expresses the hope that “we should be able to identify the regulatory elements for any gene starting with only the DNA sequence”.
Although an old dream, I am now rather sceptical if this prediction will ever work. Recognize the differences of my drawing compared to original figure: I am introducing even another level of temporal relationships. There might be even a close relationship to yesterdays post on “retaliation“, yea, yea.
Random medical news
I am somewhat uninformed about clinical science but found this vein viewer impressive as well as the self assembling surgical knots, yea, yea.
From “Massive Retaliation” to “Flexible Response”
Having read again Beutlers 2004 TLR review, I am always fascinated by the flexible response and the hourglass response effect. On the outside there is the microbial universe and inside are the many strategies to fight infection, but all goes through a single bottleneck. What is the reason behind? To calm down but strike when necessary?
Do not run after a cart that will not take you
Starting with another African proverb, here are some thoughts about evolution, design and the difference of chimps and humans. Yes, I am biased, I know.
I have learned that there are mainly three differences between chimps and human – the ability to run, a larger brain size and the language/speech capability. The only trait that can directly observed is the ability to run (check Munich marathon: Neither brain size and language can be directly observed :-) BTW, I renember having seen a family that walk on feet and hands – quadrupedal locomotion is a recessive trait linked to chromosome 17p, the way we all start our lifes).
So genetics is playing a big role in the human < -> ape differentiation. Or did the differentation select the genes?
You will understand my great expectations when now reading one of the first serious papers about the chimp and the human lineage. It is about pseudogenization, the gene loss during separation of species. The authors show 80 non-processed pseudogenes inactivated in the human lineage – while gently negelecting the fact of another 7868 or so pseudogenes in the human pseudogene database.
There is also nothing about my favorite trait bipedalism (only a ridiculous quote of pseudogenization of the sarcomeric myosin gene MYH16 that should relate to hominin masticatory muscles that “may have allowed the brain size expansion”, uhhh. It is also hard to understand how gain of ability should be caused by loss of gene function, yea, yea.
Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
Asthma in Africa: I will touch this issue in more detail in a forthcoming editorial in PLos Medicine. Africa has fascinated me since childhood when I read books of Paul White, Albert Schweitzer and tried to get everything our library had about David Livingstone and Morton Stanley. Here is a further link that we couldn’t place in the editorial – a 2 month helicopter trip from Hamburg to Kapstadt including daily GPS data to watch a heli flying in Google Earth, simply the best, I have seen in the internet this year, yea.
And the winner is…
Don´t miss the Ig Noble Ceremony. For example:
- Why woodpeckers don’t get headaches
- An electromechanical teenager repellant
- Calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure
that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed - Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity:
problems with using long words needlessly - Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage
- …
yea, yea.
Are randomized clinical trials gold standard?
A new paper in the Deutsche Ärzteblatt argues that there should be alternatives to RCTs. The reasons are manifold
- selection bias towards more severely ill patients
- selection towards too homogeneous samples
- patients may decline participation
- physician may decline participation
- bias towards larger cities and universities
- usually “hard” endpoints that ignore quality of life, compliance, side effects
- usually only short time studies
- protocol may deviate from daily practice in medical routine
Community-based studies may therefore not be as bad, yea, yea.
Addendum
An extended and reworked version of this blog can be found in issue 45 of the “Deutsche Ärzteblatt“, page A3019, 10th November 2006.