If you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey. N = 300, so I’ll stop buggin’ now and start posting results in the next day or so.
Ancient iceman’s gene map underway. Does anyone have any inside dirt on Otzi? His mtDNA was an outgroup to any modern Europeans, but we know that there’s sometimes a disjunction between mtDNA and autosomal results.
Protecting consumers from their own genetic data will come at a cost. Regulations have costs. Sometimes those costs are worth it (and result in long-term gains due to buffering of short-term volatility and such).
Vitamin D Deficiency Linked to Arterial Stiffness in Black Teens. There has been some concern about supplementation in colored people based on studies with whites, so this is important. Many people with darker-skins, including me, have been diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency and have started to take supplements. Anecdotally many of us report a decrease in respiratory infections and such. But it will be good when we have more rigorous studies.
Study says Amish expanding westward. Amish future!
Ancient DNA Identifies Donkey Ancestors, People Who Domesticated Them. Any surprise that domestication was a bottom-up, not top-down affair? Command economies are good at increasing factor inputs, but not necessarily driving innovation.
Razib Khan’s degrees are in biochemistry and biology. He has blogged about genetics since 2002, previously worked in software development, is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the western US. He loves habaneros.
July 29th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
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July 30th, 2010 at 6:50 am
Most mitochondrial lineages are lost over time by the same mechanism that extinguishes inherited surnames – the relevant information is passed along gender-related lines, and so each time a breeder happens to have only children of the ‘wrong’ gender, the information of that line is lost.
So presumably Otzi’s results tell us relatively little about his relationship to modern Europeans, right?
July 30th, 2010 at 8:05 am
Re. Vitamin D Science Daily article, here is another one called Vitamin D Levels Have Different Effects on Atherosclerosis in Blacks and Whites, Study Finds (Mar. 20, 2010) —
“Vitamin D is quickly becoming the “go-to” remedy for treating a wide range of illnesses, from osteoporosis to atherosclerosis. However, new evidence from a Wake Forest University School of Medicine study suggests that supplementing vitamin D in those with low levels may have different effects based on patient race and, in black individuals, the supplement could actually do harm.”
Here is the prestigious large scale (300 subjects) study Vitamin D, Adiposity, and Calcified Atherosclerotic Plaque in African-Americans “positive associations exist between 25-hydroxyvitamin D and aorta and carotid artery CP in African-Americans. ”
The huge state of the art July 2010 study Common genetic determinants of vitamin D insufficiency: a genome-wide association study found that none of the genes they identified are linked with skin pigmentation.
Confirmation of that interpretation in an article Here:- ” the accompanying (Lancet) editorial points out, it is somewhat surprising that none of the genes identified are linked with skin pigmentation”