Tag Archive for 'scientific publication'

Looking closer at natural selection in inflammatory bowel disease

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we recently published a large study into the genetics of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which included a number of analyses digging into the biology and evolutionary history of IBD genetic risk. Gratifyingly, our paper has stimulated a lot of discussion among other scientists, which has generated several ideas about future directions for this work. One question that was raised by several population-genetics experts at ASHG was about our natural selection analysis, and in particular our claim to discover an enrichment of balancing selection in IBD loci. In the paper, we found clear signals of natural selection on IBD loci, a subset of which we interpreted as balancing selection. In this post I will set out how I came to this conclusion, but then outline another explanation that could explain the results: recent local positive selection in Europeans.

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The ENCODE project: lessons for scientific publication


The ENCODE Project has this week released the results of its massive foray into exploring the function of the non-protein-coding regions of the human genome. This is a tremendous scientific achievement, and is receiving plenty of well-deserved press coverage; for particularly thorough summaries see Ed Yong’s excellent post at Discover and Brendan Maher at Nature.

I’m not going to spend time here recounting the project’s scientific merit – suffice it to say that the project’s analyses have already improved the way researchers are approaching the analysis of potential disease-causing genetic variants in non-coding regions, and will have an even greater impact over time. Instead, I want to highlight what a tremendous feat of scientific publication the project has achieved.
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