Sapere Aude
Tag: dna
The Personal Genome Project is a vision and coalition of projects across the world dedicated to creating public genome, health, and trait data. Sharing data is critical to scientific progress, but has been hampered by traditional research practices. The PGP approach is to invite willing participants to publicly share their personal data for the greater good.
i just volunteered.
The firm has simulated long-term storage equivalent to 13 years at room temperature, by applying higher temperatures than samples would normally endure. Such storage costs 33% as much as freezing the samples would. And when a sample is needed for analysis, you just add water, à la Sea Monkey. The market for this sort of thing is potentially huge. In contrast with the impression given by “CSI”, a popular crime series, DNA analysis is not something that takes a glamorous technician a few minutes in a moodily lit room. The FBI alone has a backlog of more than 200K unprocessed DNA samples from convicted criminals (85% of the samples it has collected during the past 6 years). This number has almost doubled in the past year, yet it may grow even faster in the future since what was once a procedure required only for sex offenders has now become obligatory for a range of felons from murderers to drug-addicts. Moreover, starting next year, both the federal authorities and a number of states will cast an even wider net by collecting DNA from everyone they arrest (as now happens in Britain). That will swell the haul of samples by at least 500K specimens a year.
a way to conserve biological material by drying. to revert, just add water.
On top you can see human population growth over time on a log scale, so the increase really is much sharper than what you see. Below is a chart which displays the number of selected variants which began to rise in frequency particular time in the past for 2 populations. There seems to be a concomitant rise in adaptive mutations which began to be selected along with increased population size.
has evolution sped up 100x for humanity? Up to 10% of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.
My SNP for $1000, my 2008 resolution:
groups of customers coming together around shared genotypes and SNPs, comparing notes about their conditions or backgrounds and identifying areas for further scientific research on their own.
2008-05-28: fill out surveys to strengthen the links between your genetic makeup and open research questions. Sounds a lot more fun than “walking for the cure”.
2015-03-15: 23andme enters drugs. This should be very interesting. To date, they have SNPs from 800k people, and that could grow rapidly. I’d expect them to release new higher resolution kits and make them available at cost to their customers.
23andMe, the Google -backed personal genetics startup, will no longer just sell tests to consumers, or genetic data to pharmaceutical companies. This morning, it announced that it plans to start inventing medicines itself.
2015-06-18: 23andme has 1M customers now. I’m pleased to be among the first 0.2% 🙂
2019-07-16: 23andMe Chip Updates
100s of 23andMe customers tested on those earlier chips have pleaded with the company for some way to get access to its latest features, like the health reports and improved ancestry estimates. Many worried about whether their old data was accurate.
2023-06-01: Now they’re doing cancer drugs, but it’s not obvious why their SNPs matter all that much? It feels they need to rebase their approach on much more powerful technology like full genome sequencing. That said, I’ve yet to receive a benefit from my Nebula 30x DNA sequencing.
23ME’610 is designed to do something similar, by binding to a receptor called CD200R1, which was identified as a promising anti-cancer target by 23andMe scientists studying the 23andMe database. CD200R1 is a cell surface receptor protein that is mostly expressed on human immune cells, specifically cancer-fighting T cells and myeloid cells. Tumor cells can express CD200, the only known binding partner for CD200R1, and use this regulatory protein to turn off the activity of T cells. A drug that blocks the ability of CD200 to bind to CD200R1 may activate T cells and enhance their ability to kill cancer cells.
these have already been done in mammals (and hence could presumably be done in humans).
Blind, accurate structure prediction for small RNAs, relying solely on the minimization of free energy, seems feasible. Once this challenge is met, modeling efforts become tantalizing possibilities for large ribozymes and protein/RNA complexes.
Androgen receptor is out of control, causing a cancerous tumor! You have to design another protein to block it and stop the cancer. Your protein needs to fit tightly up against androgen receptor. Find the side chain that plugs the hole!
with your help, we now have a number of brand new designed enzymes that speed up the chemical reactions they were designed to catalyze by more than 50000 fold!
MyHeritage eventually hopes to have 3B profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any 2 people in the world is just a mouse click away.
2012-05-26: I suspect we’ll be able to construct a family tree of all humans who ever lived in the next 50 years. Once you combine billions of complete DNA with data mining, you can predict how long ago any given mutation occurred. Genetics dictates which mutations dominated in what ways. Extract enough DNA from human remains to interpolate. the genographic project is a small step in that direction
The study integrated data on modern and ancient human genomes from eight different databases and included a total of 3609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations. The ancient genomes included samples found across the world with ages ranging from 1 ka to 100 ka. The algorithms predicted where common ancestors must be present in the evolutionary trees to explain the patterns of genetic variation. The resulting network contained 27m ancestors.
After adding location data on these sample genomes, the authors used the network to estimate where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The results successfully recaptured key events in human evolutionary history, including the migration out of Africa.
this means ancient bacteria and viruses will come back to life as ice melts due to global warming.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 