I recently transitioned jobs – from researching early diagnostics for Type II Diabetes using several omics technologies such as proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics – to working with genomics data at Golden Helix.  As scientists, one of the questions we face in examining  these many areas of data is differentiating between what Nature has provided us (in our genetic code) and what is the result of Nurture (environmentally-induced variations in the expression RNA, proteins, and metabolic signatures).

An example of this question in practice comes from one of my hobbies as an amateur apiarist (beekeeper).  The hive is predominantly a female-dominated world, and the functional purpose of each bee is the survival of the colony and support of the queen bee.  Amazingly though, despite the tens of thousands of female bees in a colony, typically only one of these females becomes the queen. Continue reading →

Allow me to introduce you to Blaine Bettinger.  Blaine is a patent attorney who holds a PhD in Biochemistry with a concentration in genetics.  He is also a family history enthusiast who writes the Genetic Genealogist blog, where he gives commentary on applications of genomic science for advancing personal and family history research.  I first learned about Blaine last May when he announced that he was committing his genomic data to the public domain and challenged any interested parties to analyze it and tell him what they learned.  As a scientist, he was aware of the limitations of the technology, but was curious to know if anybody might find something surprising.  As an intellectual property lawyer, he expressed interest in the question of whether it was even possible to truly commit one’s genomic data to the public domain.  (Anybody who attended ICHG/ASHG in Montreal may have heard some of the debate about whether genomic research data belongs to the researcher, the study subject, the funding agency, or some other entity.)  I immediately downloaded the data with grand visions of what I might do with it, but set it aside due to other obligations and forgot about it until rediscovering it just a few weeks ago. Continue reading →