The genomes of multiple East Asian populations bear the signature of a viral epidemic that occurred approximately 900 generations, or 25,000 years (28 years per generation) ago, according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology. Souilmi et al. apply evolutionary analyses to human genomic datasets to recover …
Read More »Parasitic Scorpionflies
Fleas are not a separate insect order, as previously thought, and are a lineage of scorpionflies, which evolved when they started feeding on the blood of vertebrates sometime between 290 and 165 million years ago (Permian to Jurassic periods), according to a new genetic analysis of fleas and related insects. …
Read More »Medical Imaging Machine
SOPHiA GENETICS, the shoutily and poorly capitalized-named startup that’s combining machine learning tools for medical imaging and genetic sequencing to come up with a more holistic view of diseases for better patient care, has raised $110 million in new funding. The Series F round for the company was led by …
Read More »History of Penguins
Genetic Researchers Reconstruct Evolutionary In a new study, an international team of scientists used 22 newly-sequenced genomes from 18 extant species of penguins to reconstruct the history of their diversification and adaptation. The authors found that ancient penguins diverged in the early Miocene epoch in Australia and New Zealand and …
Read More »Genetic Variations
Researchers Identify 126,018 Human Genetic Variations A team of scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Francis Crick Institute, and EMBL-EBI has created a comprehensive structural variation atlas for a geographically diverse set of human genomes and recovered sequences missing from the human reference sequence. Among the 126,018 structural variations discovered …
Read More »Ancient DNA Reveals Genetic Continuity between Early Holocene, Modern Populations in Northwest North America
According to a new analysis of nuclear DNA from ancient individuals, many of today’s indigenous peoples living in southern Alaska and coastal British Columbia are descendants of the first humans to make their home in northwest North America more than 10,000 years ago (early Holocene epoch). A study by John …
Read More »Genetic Researchers Predict Children’s Reading Ability from DNA
An international team of scientists from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden has used a genetic scoring technique to predict reading performance throughout school years from DNA alone. Calculating an individual’s GPS requires information from a genome-wide association study that finds specific genetic variants linked to particular traits. …
Read More »New GOP bill lets companies force you to take genetic tests, lets them share results with third parties
A new bill introduced by Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and approved by the House Ways and Means Committee would allow corporations to force employees to undergo genetic testing — and then share those results with third parties. In theory, this is already illegal, thanks to a 2008 law known as GINA. …
Read More »Researchers Find New Genetic Variants that Influence Human Adult Height
Eighty-three height-associated genetic variants have been discovered in a large-scale study led by researchers from Queen Mary University of London, Montreal Heart Institute, the Broad Institute and the University of Exeter. The research appears today in the journal Nature. Eirini Marouli et al report 83 height-associated coding variants with lower …
Read More »Women’s health startup Celmatix now offers genetic testing for fertility issues
Celmatix, a startup with a focus on personalized medicine for women, wants to take some of the mystery out of the science of baby-making with a new type of DNA-based fertility test called Fertilome. Fertilome looks at 49 variants in 32 genes that give you a likelihood or not for …
Read More »