DISQUS

Think Gene: A tall story: New research adds to growing body of knowledge of genetics of height

  • Daniel MacArthur · 1 year ago
    That's some serious positive spin! In fact, the interesting finding here is just how few height genes were identified by the three studies, given their enormous sample sizes (more than 25,000 individuals in one case). This indicates that the genetics of height are extremely complex, and has implications for the use of genome-wide scans in common diseases such as bipolar and diabetes.
  • Andrew Yates · 1 year ago
    Daniel, I've read your blog, and it's excellent. Thank you for your comment.

    Daniel is referring to a new genomic testing technique called Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) which was used in this study. Rather than comparing entire genomes to find associations between DNA sequences and diseases ---which is too expensive with current technology--- researchers compare "representational SNP sample sets."

    A very crude analogy would be that GWAS is like looking for differences between novel editions by comparing every 13th letter of each copy.