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The most popular Services mentioned in /r/genetics:
23andMe
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Coursera
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The most popular reviews in /r/genetics:
I found "The Gene" to be pretty helpful.
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https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukherjee/dp/1432837818
Porcupine was first discovered in Drosophila, and Drosophilists have a penchant for whimsical names. The phenotype of a porc amorphic mutation is lethal, and the larvae die leaving behind a cuticle with segment polarity defects because wingless (which requires porc for function) arranges the body plan and is necessary to place the larval denticles (little hooks used for crawling) in the proper places. Without wingless, or porcupine, or disheveled, or hedgehog, or frizzled, etc etc, there are too many denticle bands and the cuticle is tiny, round, and very spiky. Like a hedgehog. Or a porcupine...
Here is a link to pictures of some of them (wg, hh, fz). The porcupine photos are not impressive (Figure 4), it takes someone who stares at these cuticle preps a lot to really appreciate it.
Why? She had zero agency in the generation of HeLa cells. That's like having a national day of recognition for Willis J. Armstrong, the grandfather of Neil, just because something that he produced went on to later produce the first man on the moon. He didn't do any of the work. He didn't do anything outside of his normal activities, but without him the moon landing would have been in jeopardy. So let's give him and Henrietta Lacks a combined holiday and call it "Terrific Happenstance Day".
It's currently only for Android, so here's the link to the Google Play page.
You can also join my discord to chat with other players, give me feedback or report the bugs you find. Here's the link.
You can try 23andMe. If you go to the company's website, you'll see an example of a pie chart of ethnicity that you'll get with your results. It's $99, but it will probably cost you a bit more for international shipping.
While I also tend to disagree with OP, I also have to disagree with you ;)
> All other sciences and technologies proceed in unpredictable jumps, while IT has been following a relatively smooth trajectory (on the scale of years) for decades.
Well not all and unpredictable doesn't mean bad, sequencing cost has jumped ahead of moor's law quite a bit: http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/
It's also important to understand that due to several physical limitations, we are at a gear shift for chips at the moment: http://hackaday.com/2015/09/09/exponential-growth-in-linear-time-the-end-of-moores-law/ The rise of multi-cores are a reaction to single cores being limited, and while with time I am sure we can push the limits a lot further, assuming the 'reduction of size' that has been going on for the last decades will 'naturally' continue is delusional, even intel has talked about the decreasing cost-return of new production facilities.
> In 10 years we will have exaflop desktop computers, and all that will be needed for human level artificial intelligence will be the appropriate algorithms.
After Moore's law it would be 15 years for human brain level computers (based on #neurons), and I believe that isn't on any old desktop, but super computers.
Dig into interesting real-world genetics; the prevalence of Sickle-Cell Anaemia in areas with high malarial infection rates, or of Cystic Fibrosis where pulmonary infections are commonplace. A lot of people externalise genetics and evolution as something that only applies to "other life", and the believe that human evolution has "stalled" is widespread, so the relevance seems low. Make it relevant.
Of course, shameless plug time, hands-on interaction with genetics is valuable too; many or perhaps most of us are more practical in our learning and need to handle something to understand it. That's why I'm creating a teaching kit for genetic engineering; so people can self-teach or learn together how to make genetically engineered bacteria, and how to take the next steps towards designing their own.
Speaking of which, synthetic biology puts the "computer" in genetics, which can appeal to geeky types (like myself).
KhanAcademy has an excellent unit named "Classical and molecular genetics" in their Biology Library.
I'm a Biology student in my 4th year of undergrad and I used AK lectures to better understand concepts. Disclaimer, his videos are pretty in-depth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLdJTcBnO3c&list=PL9jo2wQj1WCOxYmwHZdbrvHdbGh0kVjVu
You could also use https://libgen.is/ to get access to university textbook PDFs.
Happy learning :)
I can't find any reliable information about the genetics of epicanthic eye folds. If we assumed that it was a recessive Mendelian trait, then it is entirely possible that a proportion (vague, I know) of the population are carriers but don't have folds.
Alternatively, it is possible that somewhere along the way your family has picked up a dominant mutation that causes epicanthic eye folds. This is pure speculation though and unlikely unless you also have a history of neurodevelopmental disorders.
If you are interested in your genetic ancestry you might consider a commercially available test which assays common genetic variation (not rare mutations) across the whole genome and estimates what proportion of your genome is shared with different human populations.
Hey, here's one from cyanobacteria:
If I remember correctly, cyanobacteria are unique because they can fix nitrogen and utilize oxygenic photosynthesis, but they don't implode because life is weird and can do whatever it feels like sometimes.
Hope this helps!
edit: missed a word
They are still bound by law, and their own policies.
Genetic data privacy and protection are topics that many people (researchers, regulators, policy makers) are very engaged with. If data is shared against consents, the company can be sued, fined, and face other consequences like loss of regulatory approval. The entity receiving data (in an above-board contract situation, with say, a pharma company, not a criminal breach) also does legal diligence on the consents and what they can receive compliantly. The receiver also takes on liability and data stewardship obligations and are not about to open themselves to those same consequences by getting unconsented data.
In AncestryDNA you can request that your personal samples be destroyed and data deleted (https://www.ancestry.com/cs/legal/PrivacyForAncestryDNATesting) which means the company can no longer include it in any identifiable, deidentified, or aggregate results. It's gone. If OP is considering other companies, the big ones all have similar options. The ones trying to sell "genetically personalized" supplements to their userbase are scams anyways and I'd trust them way less on every front, including data security.
While of course the company wants to make money, there are more than enough people who deliberately do want to allow their samples to be used, or simply don't mind the risks (which are very minor at this point in time), that there is no way a company would compromise their financial and reputational security to include people who don't want to be a part of that.
With regards to species, you get two separate species when they are unable to have fertile offspring. So the threshold for that that the DNA change to cause enough incompatability that they are unable to have fertile offspring.
With regards to heritage, you can read about how 23 and me determines ancestry on their website: https://www.23andme.com/en-ca/ancestry-composition-guide/
Genes are not predictors of future health. On the protein level, structure is a lot more conserved than code, having the faulty gene does not necessarily mean the person will inherit the disease.
Complex diseases in the wider population are affected not only by heredity, but also by external causes such as lifestyle and environment. I know they ask you all of this, but to what accuracy? Aren't you paying for accuracy?
If you can't access that I'd be happy to email it to you.
It has a watermark, but it doesn't make the paper unreadable.
I would second Coursera. It has great lectures, classes, assignments, and discussion boards with the other students and professor/TA. If you want introduction and some applicable stuff I would recommend taking the Useful Genetics course. It is up to snuff...
Step 1: Install linux and get used to using bash. I highly recommend the Linux Pocket Guide for a very small book with only the most useful commands in it.
Step 2: As others have already highlighted, Python and R are currently the most relevant tools. I'm an R man, myself and would recommend using RStudio for your work. I'm sure the pythinistas here will have favorite environments for coding in python that they could suggest.
Cheers!
> What confuses me is that the definitions of both allele and gene are the same - “a segment of DNA sequence”. > > > > So there has to be a distinction between the terms. And this distinction is that the gene is like a set or group of alleles, right? An all sets are grouped based on some property. That property in this case being the product of alleles.
Think of it like textbooks. You know how textbooks (or most books, but especially text books) have different editions? A lot of times the editions just have very minor changes.
So, a gene would be that specific text book. Let's use this as an example: https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Genetics-Lynn-Jorde-PhD/dp/0323597378
It's a 6th edition, so there are 5 other editions before it. That specific book would be like a gene. The 6 editions are alleles of that gene. They are just slight variations of the same thing.
But, a different genetics textbook would be like a different gene. Even if it's a textbook on genetics, it's not that genetics texbook.
Does that make it more clear?
This book from 2019 summarizes the latest development of the topic in a popular manner:
https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-What-Your-Grandparents/dp/0778806332
Unhealthy lifestyle leading to obesity will affect your offspring for generations.
What process do you wish to study? What organism, biological-/biochemical-system enables that research? What manipulation and analysis techniques are required (macro and micro)?
It’s trivial to setup a microbiology lab with a pressure cooker as autoclave, laminar flow hood or still-air box for sterile / sanitary work, and incubator/fridge/freezer for growth and storage of cultures/strains.
With this setup you could do classical forward genetics with yeast, oyster mushrooms, e. coli etc depending on what your goals are. You could also work with plants like Gregor Mendel did. You could develop new strains of flowering plants, for instance, through breeding and phenotype hunting / selection.
If you’re trying to directly manipulate the biopolymers and do “modern” molecular genetics then you’ll need more, expensive equipment generally and this will become cost prohibitive.
I would say, if you don’t understand classical genetics and how to setup a lab for that, then don’t move on to modern molecular biology.
Research the history of genetics and learn everything you can about the classic experiments and what technology they used. There are some fantastic text books, such as https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Genetic-Analysis-Anthony-Griffiths/dp/1319114784, for which you can find inexpensive used copies.
>So, before the skin-development genes are turned off inside the stomach cell, the cell contained the potentiality to develop skin instead of being a stomach cell?
Kinda. In the embryo, cells progress from being pluripotent (these cells can become any kind of cell) to multipotent (can become any cell in a certain lineage, e.g. bone marrow cells)- its called the Waddington landscape
But yes; and these processes can be involved in the development of some cancers; In zollinger-ellison syndrome intestinal cells can start producing hormones (gastrin) normally produced by stomach cells- which causes issues.
>And this process of methylation determines which potentiality is activated and thereby what sort of work the cell will do?
As with most things in development; it's a little more complicated than that. It's a complex mix of histone modifications, transcription factors, and methylation. But methylation plays a role.
>So, the genes in the 'imprinted region' are ones which have not been "wiped" after fertilization - and these are the ones in which epigenetic marks can be passed from parent to child?
Correct. In some conditions this can cause problems; such as in Angelman's syndrome. The gene coming from the father (on the sperm) is silenced, and the mothers is allowed to be expressed. This means, even if the paternal gene is normal, and the mothers is mutated, the patient will present with issues, as the 'backup' gene cannot be expressed.
I recommend this book for learning more
Genetic factors predisposing to homosexuality may increase mating success in heterosexuals
> There is considerable evidence that human sexual orientation is genetically influenced, so it is not known how homosexuality, which tends to lower reproductive success, is maintained in the population at a relatively high frequency. One hypothesis proposes that while genes predisposing to homosexuality reduce homosexuals' reproductive success, they may confer some advantage in heterosexuals who carry them. However, it is not clear what such an advantage may be. To investigate this, we examine a data set where a large community-based twin sample (N=4904) anonymously completed a detailed questionnaire examining sexual behaviors and attitudes. We show that psychologically masculine females and feminine men are (a) more likely to be nonheterosexual but (b), when heterosexual, have more opposite-sex sexual partners. With statistical modelling of the twin data, we show that both these relationships are partly due to pleiotropic genetic influences common to each trait. We also find a trend for heterosexuals with a nonheterosexual twin to have more opposite-sex partners than do heterosexual twin pairs. Taken together, these results suggest that genes predisposing to homosexuality may confer a mating advantage in heterosexuals, which could help explain the evolution and maintenance of homosexuality in the population.
I know you've said textbooks here, but have you thought about the free online university courses offered on websites such as coursera & edX?
I did a quick search for molecular genetics and came up w a few reasonable looking courses:
https://www.edx.org/course?search_query=Molecular+genetics
https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=Molecular%20genetics
These may be a bit above the level you need but might be good for interest's sake or just skip through for some background/direction?
I can looks at my intro genetics textbooks tomorrow and let you know what I used (first year uni in 2007 - Australia) if you're interested. I'm currently working in the field but in animal genetics, so probably can't help all that much but feel free to PM me if you want :)
Oh hey....beyond the other post I made....just read this book. Arguably the best book on molecular biology that currently exists. It's not gonna teach you techniques or protocols or anything, but it's foundational knowledge. After that comes the techniques and protocols.
Read it front to back, then read a few papers on CRISPR and genetic manipulation. It'll blow your damn mind.
I recently read this. There are various chapters that sound like they will be interesting to you: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7791902-human-evolutionary-biology
There is a chapter about evolution of skin color, one about disease resistance, one about height adaptations, one about popular structure, and some more stuff.
Another good way to get inspired, is to follow interesting people on Goodreads. Here is my profile. Razib Khan has one too, a prominent HBD/genetics blogger.
I'd recommend reading 23andMe's page explaining how they assign ancestry composition. They also have a more technical white paper. I suspect that LivingDNA is doing something similar, but I can't find a detailed breakdown on their website.
> I am 26.3% Sindhi, does that mean that one of my grandparents was 100% Pakistani Sindhi?
No. There are plenty of ancestry configurations that could result in 26.3% of your DNA most closely resembling the Sindhi population. In general, I would be cautious about trying to infer a specific ancestral pedigree from ancestry pedigree. Moreover, there's no such thing as being 100% Sindhi (or any other population), at least from a genetic perspective.
> a fully black father and fully white mother would be around 50% black and 50% white with some variation right?
Race isn't purely (or even primarily) genetic, and nobody is "fully black" or "fully white". You get exactly half of your autosomes from your mother and half from your father (ignoring uniparental disomy and such edge cases). You cannot have a significant portion from your genome be inherited from a single parent; this is embryonic lethal. You'd expect half of the ancestry composition to match your mother's ancestral background and half your father's, but ancestry is messy and the datasets that we're trying to impute ancestry compositions from are also messy, so it's possible (or even probable) that the assignment won't be 50:50. I'm not going to speculate on how far off these could be, as it would depend on the genetics of the parents in question, the database of references, and the ancestry deconvolution algorithm.
This podcast series is fantastic, but here is the one on the end of humanity due to biotechnology
Like I said, this is most likely culture dependent.
The AGT Cytogenetics Laboratory Manual. https://www.amazon.com/AGT-Cytogenetics-Laboratory-Manual/dp/1119061229
Fun fact: That's my case on the front cover. :)
Oh yeah i forgot that genome sequencing is one of the only other examples of exponential growth haha, my bad.
And you make a good point that we are at the end of the current paradigm of microprocessors, but this has already happened 3 times before (vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits to microprocessors) and before each jump people have said theres no way we'll find something that works better. Now this time is a little different because we're actually starting to push against the limits of how small we can make things, but hopefully we'll figure something out :)
https://www.quora.com/Roughly-what-processing-power-does-the-human-brain-equate-to This shows that a good estimate of the processing power of our brains is around 38 petaflops, about one thousand times less than an exaflop
I got the exaflop desktop by mid 2020's thing from a video by the guy who founded Google's Deepmind which I now cannot find sorry
Sterilization laws were in effect many places, including the nordic countries.
Here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3831890-eugenics-and-the-welfare-state PDF: http://libgen.org/book/index.php?md5=cb3e377ed49f9390551a50078f4dbd59
You could be 99% African and still have European mtDNA if just your direct maternal line came from Europe. What you need to look at is autosomal DNA, which all sides of your family contribute to. The easiest way to do this would be to buy a test kit from 23andMe. Your mother's results in their Ancestry Composition utility would immediately tell you if your grandmother had significant racial admixture. You can read about how it works here and read a review here.
There's FoldIT: https://fold.it/portal/index.php?q=
and Phylo: https://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/
I believe that they are designed by academics are actually reviewed by the scientists to solve crystal structures and refine algorithms.
So just a quick look at the mtDNA haplogroup yields some pretty interesting results
You can probably go way down a rabbit hole about the origin and nature of inheritance like this, but at a certain point I think you need to understand the limitations and implications of Paleogenetics and anthropology (which is incredibly cool!! I recommend this book if you’re interested !!!)
Haplotyping by my understanding is just looking for a small number of relatively inconsequential mutations which are conserved among populations which can be used to more accurately group population evolution in “recent” history, as opposed to say functional mutations which could do the same (I.e. lactase production in adults which is linked to specific populations)
Anyway hope that helps a little!! It’s a deeply fascinating subject.
I strongly recommend this book, it summarizes the whole debate and then proceeds to review the evidence. It is a collection on essays by different scientists, and many conclude that many claims in the Bell Curve were exaggerated (the bell curve is one of the main books discussing genetics and IQ and the BW gap). It also explains how heritability is estimated, what it means, how people misunderstand it etc... I particularly liked Clark Glymour's essay on statistical methods in the social sciences, which invalidates not only the Bell Curve but much of social science !
> I don’t really know what your point is.
The point is that Watson is not racist, pseudoscientific, and other insults spewed in this thread.
> Are you saying Watson’s claims were scientific because he had research articles to support his hypothesis?
Both because his theory is scientifically valid (it makes predictions and is not unfalsifiable) and because there is empirical evidence for (or maybe even against) it.
> Because I haven’t seen anything to that end.
I recommend https://www.amazon.co.uk/Know-Debunking-Myths-about-Intelligence/dp/1108493343
> I’m not going to write a thesis pointing out all the faults in your comment or Watson’s claims
Nor did I ask to. You are making stuff up.
> I spent all of 5 minutes on that last one and don’t care to make it worthy of peer review.
Nobody talked about peer review lol.
Dawkins proposed that the selfish gene was the "right" way to view evolution. I think the leaders in this area have moved on to a more nuanced view. Sometimes a gene-centric view is the best way to understand a problem. Often focusing on the individual is as good or better. Occasionally it may even make sense to consider group evolution, although there are still debates about whether this perspective is rarely appropriate or never appropriate.
If you want to learn more, I recommend Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. He has a very nuanced view of how evolution at different levels (gene, individual, population) can interact.
Here is one example from the book. An old oak tree may seem like an individual. But mutations can occur during the life of a tree, so it may be that acorns on one branch are slightly different, genetically, from acorns on another branch. In other words, these acorns are more like cousins (children of siblings) rather than being siblings themselves. These acorns from different branches could have different genetic advantages and disadvantages and could compete with each other evolutionarily.
Godfrey-Smith uses examples like this to explore the boundaries between the gene-centric view and the individual-centric view. This is a pretty technical book, so perhaps not everybody's cup of tea, but I found it fascinating.
Creation: How Science is Reinventing Life Itself Excuse the amazon link - Currently reading, so I can’t say how much he gets into genetics, but he is a geneticist and its an enjoyable approachable summary to my college education in biological science.
Some good thoughts here...it was a bottleneck effect, but purely in Europe. Zero to do with Babylonia, and pre-Ashkenazi Jewish groups play no role at all, or it would be seen in Sephardic and Oriental Jews, which this effect is not. Holocaust played zero role in this. All of this is discussed in great detail in my very well reviewed book, https://www.amazon.com/Abrahams-Children-Identity-Chosen-People/dp/0446580635
>Do people in colder climates have greater intelligence?
Yes. This should be fairly obvious since northern peoples (now) often have higher genotypic IQ and higher quality environments.
>I saw someone a few months ago talk about how europeans were smarter than africans because they were in a "cold climate"
It's due to a multitude of evolutionary reasons. This isn't as simple as 1 cause. We know for example that the cold winters theory can't be the only cause since selection still impacts intelligence while CWT predicts selection has stopped.
>I know that the difference in IQ between races nowadays is due to the environmental reasons
What environmental reasons?
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For an in-depth look at this, read https://www.amazon.com/RHYTHM-WEST-Biohistory-Modern-Present/dp/187846549X
Infant mortality has dropped from very common to extremely rare. It is not outrageous to think that this have had a dysgenic effect. Ed Dutton writes anout this in his book: https://www.amazon.com/At-Our-Wits-End-Intelligent/dp/184540985X
You got it. If you want a really good book about it with lots of really great examples I recommend "The Greatest Show On Earth" https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/1416594795
I found this pretty helpful. It was recommended to me by a client.
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https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukherjee/dp/1432837818
Matt Ridley's "Genome". It goes through the 23 chromosomes and gives neat little stories/facts about each one. Pretty easy read, but serves as a good base.
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford is currently on my wishlist. Although I would start with Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene if I were you.
If you want something dense, more like a textbook, I'd also suggest giving Genetics: A Conceptual Approach by Benjamin A. Pierce a try.
These texts tend to become outdated pretty quick, unfortunately. I used Genetics: A Conceptual Approach by Benjamin Pierce in undergrad for most of my degree program. It is alright but a bit dry, and while it does a great job explaining some concepts it just as often does poorly. I also really quite enjoyed Introduction to Genetic Analysis by Griffiths, et al., which I used earlier in my studies. I felt it did a better job of breaking topics and ideas down more than Pierce and it was laid out in a manner where each progressive chapter would build upon topics from the previous chapter instead of skipping around. Genetics is an interesting field of study, and hopefully these texts will help you achieve a better understanding of the topics that interest you (and others!).
There's an ethnography by Paul Rabinow from the 90s that talks about just how constructed and artificial this is. In fact, it's called "French DNA". We certainly have traceable ancestry, but this ~~rarely follows national boundaries~~ is only tangentially related to "nationality" per se.
Hello, this is the textbook my molecular biology class is using. It covers genetics and gene expression and regulation and may be what you're looking for. I'm using it for a graduate course as supplemental reading material, but many undergrad courses use the same text allegedly.
Molecular Biology https://www.amazon.com/dp/0073525324/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_vuh-vbD8TG803