Where does the 50% average risk number come from? I read through the paper and didn't see that anywhere.

I can't really offer too much opinion on that since I don't work in psych, but I'm always a bit dubious of clear cut GWAS results in general. Maybe the new material is the result of the clustering analysis?

Not necessarily. Many of these SNPs have very little effect on their own, and only cause full blown schizophrenia when they are combined. Some may have a benefit, but given the large number of SNPs they could just be neutral alleles with little selective pressure until they are combined.

This is especially interesting since often GWAS studies fail to find anything novel, even at very large population sizes. Having a definitive phenotype and taking a network approach to SNP analysis really let this study make some interesting conclusions.

It's especially interesting to see this article juxtaposed with the killer potato article posted a few hours ago. That potato was demonstrably toxic and was released commercially, but was the result of only traditional plant breeding.

One of the potatoes most commonly used for making potato chips is a variety called Atlantic, and Lenape is one of the parents for that line. So even though Lenape can be toxic, you are still eating it every day.

In case anyone wants to read the study, you can find it in full here, though the figures don't appear to be included:

Next they need to sequence C. arabica, the species of coffee that doesn't taste like it was originally brewed up to strip the paint off of ocean liners.

Working in the chemistry department as an undergrad, one morning the lab smells much nicer than usual, a bit like maraschino cherries. Turns out a couple of the tubes from the advanced O-Chem lab had popped open and soaked the cardboard box they were in. I go and tell the lab manager about it since I don't know what…

I'm a bit surprised that this only made it into PLoS. I'm not a zoologist so I don't know the highest ranked publications for that field, but it seems like this might have been a bit higher impact. Maybe it's because they didn't do any kind of genetic analysis (which is a bit ironic since if they had they could have…

So this won't address the revealing himself at the base bit, but a lot of submarines in W2 were basically ships that could occasionally submerge for a while. Unless they had a reason to go underwater, they probably traveled on the surface.

It would be interesting if they'd posted some of the technical specifications of this device, instead of just calling it a hand-held DNA sequencer. It's cool that it can actually do the sequencing in the same reaction as the amplification (or so I assume, they don't actually say) but I wonder about doing sample prep…

It worked for the guy who invented local anesthesia, so it should work here too! Of course, I work in plant biology, so I can only dream of the kind of funding NIH supported labs can get. On the other hand, I imagine mutant venus flytrap battles could be quite the tidy moneymaker.

Perhaps it's fitness "to make sweeping claims and get some of that sweet sweet ENCODE money, not that we are bitter."

My bad, I missed that line. That's what I get for skimming. In that case yeah, it's a pretty silly claim to make, even though I still think the ENCODE definition of "functional" is unnecessarily broad.

I'm also a biologist, but it's worth pointing out that this paper is in PLoS Genetics, which is has a hugely higher impact factor than PLoS One, and isn't where undergrad projects go to die.

The title of this article is pretty overblown, the actual paper that is cited doesn't make any such grandiose claims.

But like I said in my first comment, essentially we are back to arguing semantics at this point then. You are calling something functional since it essentially is provide spacing between things, and the authors are arguing that it isn't functional since in most cases the actual sequence is immaterial.

I'm really not sure what you are asking here. I even said in my reply that introns have function, I seriously doubt that anyone would argue with that.

No, nearly all of that is parasitic repetitive elements. I think you are also over-estimating the amount of energy necessary to duplicate a genome. Compared to the amount of energy and material needed to replicate the rest of the cell, the duplication of the DNA requires relatively little. It's more likely that…