In the search for disease causing mutations it is important to determine if the variant has been previously observed in humans and at what frequency. With the advent of increasing genomic information, there is now a variety of different databases and annotation sources that can be utilized. For some, this could be a tedious task that leads only to implementing… Read more »
An under-appreciated area of complexity when looking into the field of genetics from the outside can be found in genes and transcripts. Alternative splicing allows eukaryotic species to have a wonderfully powerful genetic code, resulting in multiple protein isoforms being encoded in a single section of DNA. But when it comes to variant interpretation, different transcripts can result in widely different predicted… Read more »
I’m sitting in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum basking in the incredible product of human innovation and the hard work of countless engineers. My volunteer tour guide started us off at the Wright brother’s fliers and made a point of saying it was only 65 years from lift off at Kitty Hawk to the landing of a man on the moon…. Read more »
You probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how we represent genes in a genomic reference sequence context. And by genes, I really mean transcripts since genes are just a collection of transcripts that produce the same product. But in fact, there is more complexity here than you ever really wanted to know about. Andrew Jesaitis covered some of this… Read more »