More than half of the proposed budget, $130 million, would go to the NIH to develop a “voluntary national research cohort,” a million or more people that will almost certainly include DNA sequencing for some. There’s not much detail to go on yet, but the program seems to involve a massive push to track and study Americans’ health-including medical data and genomes. In January, President Obama announced in his proposed budget for 2016 that he wanted to devote $215 million to a project called the Precision Medicine Initiative. And that's where the big push for genetic research in the United States, with its own enormously valuable, diverse population, begins. "It's really the completeness of the information-the sequencing data, the clinical information, the phenotypical data, the drug reaction data-that lets you tie it together," says Brooks. On the other hand, neither of those projects have the same detailed genealogical background that comes with the Icelandic database, and they have varying levels of medical data associated with individual sequences. "1000 Genomes has a lot more populations," says Brooks, "so you can look at variants that cause specific disease in America, or India, or China." The same goes for the Exome Aggregation Consortium, which has collected the protein-coding portions of the genome from more than 60,000 individuals. There are other large-scale genome sequencing projects, like the 1000 Genomes project, which, contrary to its name, has already sequenced around 2,500 genomes from all around the world. In the new papers, the tally is 20 million variants, some of which have already been linked to diseases.īut thanks to the decreasing cost of genetic sequencing, that scaling up is beginning to happen. That means that there’s less genetic variation, which in turn means less background noise to interfere with the identification of meaningful gene variants. Established by Norsemen and Celts in 9 A.D., Iceland has a remarkably homogenous population that can trace its lineage to just a few common ancestors, according to Kári Stefánsson, deCODE's founder and CEO. “The Icelandic system is the perfect system to do this in,” says Lisa Brooks, director of the genetic variation program at the National Human Genome Research Institute. That covers almost a third of the entire population-and Iceland's genealogical and medical records are famously exquisite. In these latest studies, deCODE sequenced the full genomes of 2,636 Icelanders, along with less detailed genetic information from more than 100,000 others, in the form of genotyping microarrays like the ones used by 23andMe that look at every 10,000 or so of the genome's 3 billion letters. But more important than the results themselves are where they came from-and what that origin story says about the future of genetic research. Their findings will help guide medical research and the understanding of human evolution. Their results, which range from the identification of a new Alzheimer’s-associated gene to the age of the most recent male ancestor shared by all humans, are part of a long history of genetic discoveries from deCODE, a company that has been collecting and analyzing Icelandic genomes for 18 years. Today, the journal Nature Genetics released a set of four papers based entirely on the genetic sequences of Icelanders. It’s also the best place in the world to do genetic research. A small, flat rock isolated in the middle of the North Atlantic, Iceland is unique in many ways: It has active volcanoes, semi-tasty whale-based dishes, and a kick-ass travel advertising campaign.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |