Networking: Got fat?
So maybe this systems biology thing might catch on after all…Matthew Herper calls attention to a Nature study (summarized here) wherein Rosetta Inpharmatics and deCODE analyzed the expression of ~24,000 genes in order to find networks of genes associated with changes in body mass index. In other words, it’s GWAS meets microarrays.
The new technique isn’t a final solution to the problem of how to figure out which genetic defects actually cause disease, says Leroy Hood head of the Institute for Systems Biology. Leonid Kruglyak of Princeton University led a 2002 team that used the same basic ideas to understand genes in yeast. “It’s nice to see this beginning to bear fruit in human studies,” he says.
George Church of Harvard University says his project to sequence the DNA of thousands of people–called the Personal Genome Project–is collecting data from tissue samples to do similar kinds of work.
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."