Monthly Archives: March 2018

The Caribbean was one of the last parts of the Americas to be settled by humans, but how and when the islands were first occupied remains a matter of debate. Authors (see 2o17 article attached) comprehensively compared the mitochondrial DNA … Continue reading →

The gut microbiome has become increasingly recognized as having an extremely important role in innumerable aspects of human physiology and health. A fundamental question has been the extent to which microbiome composition is determined by host genetics. Previous studies have … Continue reading →

Schizophrenia is a disorder that includes psychosis as well as negative symptoms such as social and emotional withdrawal. The onset of psychosis typically does not occur until late adolescence or early adulthood, but clinical and epidemiological studies do indicate that … Continue reading →

An essential part of “the scientific process” is to synthesize results across studies to reach an overall understanding of a problem and to identify sources of variation in outcomes. Before ~1978, the results of scientific studies have been summarized in … Continue reading →

Clinical laboratory measurements, such as the results from blood tests, can be powerful because such quantitative phenotypes (traits) are useful in diagnosing and monitoring human diseases. Clarification of the underlying genetics, as well as inference of genetic relationships to diseases … Continue reading →

Environmental exposures, coupled with genetic variation, are known to have an effect on disease susceptibility. Dissecting their respective contributions remains one of the principal challenges in understanding complex diseases. Individuals with different genotypes (DNA sequence changes) may respond differently to … Continue reading →

Thanks, Ken, for your remark. Beall’s List (although removed) can still be found online (and “last updated Feb 16, 2o18”). The list includes nowhere near 15,000 but it is quite a long list. https://beallslist.weebly.com/standalone-journals.html I do not see any “Journal … Continue reading →

Over the past decade, advances in bioengineering have led to newly appreciated methods to study effects of mechanical force on single cells. Micrometer-scale culture systems that can subject individual cells to highly specific physical distortion have allowed scientists to demonstrate … Continue reading →

As these GEITP pages have often described, the genetic basis of variability in any disease phenotype, in a quantitative phenotype such as height or body mass index, or in response to a drug or an environmental toxicant can be grouped … Continue reading →

Students in grade school these days learn that DNA (containing genes) is transcribed into full-transcript RNA, which is then spliced into messenger RNA (mRNA), which gets translated into protein. By knowing the DNA sequence of any individual’s gene therefore leads … Continue reading →