Jun 30 2008
SNPwatch gives you the latest news about research linking various traits and conditions to individual genetic variations. These studies are exciting because they offer a glimpse into how genetics may affect our bodies and health; but in most cases, more work is needed before this research can provide information of value to individuals. For that [...]
Jun 27 2008
This month I had the opportunity to go to the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution conference in the striking city of Barcelona. This is the premiere conference for geneticists studying evolution in everything from bacteria to fruit flies, weeds, worms and our favorite model organism, humans! This is a highly interactive conference: almost everyone [...]
Jun 26 2008
Barack Obama, Angelina Jolie and Ned Flanders all belong to a group whose members have been referred to as weak, gauche and even downright sinister. These terms are used, in various parts of the world, to describe left-handed people.
Since right-handers outnumber southpaws by approximately 9 to 1, it’s not hard to imagine why there’s a [...]
Jun 24 2008
This morning 23andMe bravely went were no other personal genome service has gone before – Second Life!
Bertalan Mesko of scienceroll.com kindly arranged for us (ErinC and joyce) to give a presentation about our company on Second Nature, an island operated in Second Life by the Nature Publishing Group. We talked about the basics [...]
Jun 24 2008
SNPwatch gives you the latest news about research linking various traits and conditions to individual genetic variations. These studies are exciting because they offer a glimpse into how genetics may affect our bodies and health; but in most cases, more work is needed before this research can provide information of value to individuals. For that [...]
Jun 21 2008
For the past 100 years, there has been a mysterious disease afflicting Icelanders. Called Hereditary Cystatin C Amyloid Angiopathy (or HCCAA), it causes severe brain hemorrhages and dementia in young adults. For those individuals who have the disease, life expectancy is usually no higher than 30 years. Scientists have determined that this [...]
Jun 20 2008
What can we learn from studying how variations of human genes are spread out around the world?
A lot, said population geneticist and Harvard junior fellow Sohini Ramachandran, who spoke at 23andMe this week.
Ramachandran focused on how genes spread from one continent to another, and how they vary within each region as well.
As an example, she [...]
Jun 16 2008
Jesse James
One of the most engaging features of 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service is a customer’s ability to trace his or her genetic ancestry using the mitochondrial DNA and the Y-chromosome. Once customers learn their own ancestry, the Genome Sharing feature allows them to see how they compare with friends and family.
However, the ancestry section of [...]
Jun 13 2008
Roy King is a clinical psychiatrist at Stanford University. He’s also a scholar who uses genetics and archaeology to figure out how agriculture spread through Anatolia and the Mediterranean region of Europe more than 10,000 years ago.
Now Roy has another genetic puzzle to consider – himself. With the help of 23andMe, he can now see [...]
Jun 13 2008
The 1000 Genomes Project, an ambitious international research project to completely sequence the genomes of 1,000 people from all over the world in three years, announced this week that it will be getting help from three companies in the form of new sequencing technology.
“It is a win-win arrangement for all involved,” consortium co-chair [...]
