genomeboy.com

I’m at the Personal Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor. Maybe I’m jaded by now, but my expectations were low. I was wrong (admittedly it’s hard to know because they don’t give you an abstract book until you arrive). Watson gave his unique and pointed first-person history of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins talked about finding rare and semi-rare variants (unemployment has been good for him), and Mary-Claire King gave an absolute tour de force on breast cancer as a paradigm for personal genomics. This morning Richard Gibbs reflected on Watson’s genome and Elaine Mardis talked about using Illumina sequencing to decode the first cancer genome. And it’s not even 10AM.

Rich people salivating.

As the party throbbed in the ground floor space of Barry Diller’s IAC Building on West 18th Street, Mr. Weinstein, the film producer, who has acquired the Halston clothing brand, joked that DNA testing was as buzzworthy as the fashion shows taking place all week. “Now that I’m in the fashion business,” he said, “I think genetics is a natural extension.”

Pentailed tree shrews have such an appetite for alcohol that each night they imbibe, weight for weight, the equivalent of a human downing up to nine glasses of wine.

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“Alcohol intake by the pentailed tree shrew reaches levels that are dangerous to other mammals. This finding suggests adaptive benefits inherent to a diet high in alcohol.”

The German-led research team said it was likely the shrews avoided drunkenness and hangovers because their bodies had enhanced biological mechanisms to break down and dispose of alcohol, though what they are has yet to be pinpointed.

Will Saletan parses last week’s paper on sexually antagonistic selection as an explanation for the persistence of male homosexuality through the ages:

Can genes account for these patterns? To find out, the authors posit several possible mechanisms and compute their effects over time. They conclude that only one theory fits the data. The theory is called “sexually antagonistic selection.” It holds that a gene can be reproductively harmful to one sex as long as it’s helpful to the other. The gene for male homosexuality persists because it promotes—and is passed down through—high rates of procreation among gay men’s mothers, sisters, and aunts.

The authors write:

We show that only the two-locus genetic model with at least one locus on the X chromosome, and in which gene expression is sexually antagonistic (increasing female fitness but decreasing male fitness), accounts for all known empirical data.

Bring on the genome-wide association studies…

Six.

That’s how many times I was asked to repeat my name, social security number and date of birth to the technicians at the American Red Cross today. This is how we protect blood recipients?

You know, people, if you give a guy a few Navitinis, he’s probably not gonna remember much at all…

Just sayin’.

Like its competitors, 23andMe offers information about an individual’s disease risk. But it has also opted to emphasize more entertaining approaches to personal genomics, including using colorful visualization tools to look at a subject’s ancestry and compare it with that of celebrities from Jesse James to Benjamin Franklin and Bono. Now, to capitalize on the boom in social networking, the company will launch a genome-sharing tool that allows people to compare their genome with those of family members, friends, and even strangers who have offered up their DNA data. “It seems like the first natural curiosity people have is, where do I come from? What are my roots?” says Linda Avey, who cofounded 23andMe with Anne Wojcicki. “The next natural [question] is, how do I compare to other people?”