-moblog- HMG has an interesting paper of Fei Sun and Renee H. Martin – showing a first visable recombination map of the male human genome. They obtained testicular samples from 10 males where each contributed 100 pachytene-stage cells. Chromosomes were identified by blue CREST centromere coloring and yellow MHL1 coloring of crossing over sites. Unfortunately the paper is not so easy to read but they have excellent figures. On average there are 50 cross-overs per set (which is more than I expected). The total number goes down from 52 at age 30y to 46 at age 80y (which may explain the higher chance of aneuploidy at a higher age). Individual crossover frequencies look extremely variable, chromosomal locations are clustering at different site -see my recent blog on recombinogenic sequences. Activity at centromeres was always low while chromosome 21q showed a high individual variablity. Why was there never detailed workup of physical and linkage map? Nay, nay.

Slashdot corbettw writes “This article on Yahoo Science News describes a new finding that explains how the thalamus is used by your brain to essentially boot your brain, and provide for central processing and control of all impulses going to and from the cortex. The article describes its function as an operating system, but from the description it actually seems closer to the functions of a kernel.” That’s true if we see a kernel as abstraction layers for hardware, especially for memory, processors and I/O that allows hardware and software to communicate. It is probably a monolithic kernel that executes all the code in the same address space. Nay, nay.

We have done affected sib pair studies for many years with moderate success as we already described five years ago. Professor John Edwards brought to my attention the “sib similiarity problem“, that is still not widely known. ASP studies are based on “the premise that a set of ASPs will share more than the expected proportion of alleles at a disease-susceptibility locus with the implication that these were the sole cause for excess sharing”. This is not necessarily true and may be one reason of the failure of ASP studies. More or less by chance, I found that that the observation of 1 discordant sib in ASP families be an extremely powerful. “Being sane in an insane world” e.g. being healthy while having most of the risk alleles and all the environment risk that made the sibs ill. Yea, yea.

You may want to start with names listed at Laborjournal. Aside from universities major institutes are with Max Planck and Helmholtz. Main funding comes by DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, who lists all their projects at GEPRIS) and by BMBF (German Ministry of Research) with a few projects online at National Genome Research Network.