I do not think that means what you think it means, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya

I really do not care for genealogical genetics. I believe they promise you conclusions based on dubious assumptions so that you'll feel a sense of belonging, when most people, including myself, don't understand the intricacies that can go into genetics beyond simple Mendelian inheritance. I don't think the conclusions they reach regarding people are any better than the companies who purport to tell you what breed your dog is.  Beyond that, there is the matter of how utterly stupid it is to freely give a for-profit company your genetic material that they may monetise later.

Population genetics are a different matter, though, so I find this fascinating, and I loved the following quote:

In any given population, the number of lines in your family tree that reach any specific medieval person is about the same between you and everyone else who belongs to the same population you do. In other words, everyone alive today is equally related, genealogically, to all medieval people from that population.>In any given population, the number of lines in your family tree that reach any specific medieval person is about the same between you and everyone else who belongs to the same population you do. In other words, everyone alive today is equally related, genealogically, to all medieval people from that population.

 

DNA says you’re related to a Viking, a medieval German Jew or a 1700s enslaved African? What a genetic match really means

Last night I didn't blog

I just came home and crashed, and I was asleep by 10:30 pm. The scheduling gig is taking a toll on me; it's a different kind of mental juggling than I'm used to, and while I am doing a great job, by the time I reach late afternoon I just want to go away from the hospital and do anything but work. It was so nice to just be in the library today, I have to admit. The clinic counts are out for next week, and an insane number of kids are coming in Monday through Wednesday, so I'm going to work an extra hour each of those days over in that department to help out. Heaven help me. I hope my co-worker who I'm subbing for is able to come back to work soon!

I did a little research today, and I decided I should approach my doctor about having a simple blood test that could indicate a condition called hereditary haemochromatosis type 1. It involves having too much iron in the body, and a close family member mentioned having too high of iron in her blood years ago. If it is that, not only is it genetic, but it can lead to the very issues she's dealing with now. It is particularly found in people of Celtic backgrounds, and also some English and Scandinavian heritages. The Celtic and English is my primary background on both sides. Since it's passed down through autosomal recessive inheritance, I'd have to get a copy from each parent to have it, but if I have just one, I would be a carrier--not of real concern because I don't plan to have children. The good thing is that it's easily treatable through phlebotomy, or giving blood regularly. I do have some of the related symptoms, including arthritis in the hands and knees, joint pain, fatigue, and insulin resistance/diabetes (the iron deposits in the joints, causing pain, and in the pancreas, contributing to diabetes). It wouldn't impact my life much more than avoiding multivitamins with iron, giving blood regularly, and a few dietary changes. But it would be good to know. It can lead to cirrhosis of the liver, as well as a type of liver cancer, and liver cancer, taken as a whole, has a 5-year-survival rate of only about 15%. So if it can be prevented with giving blood, then I'm all for it. Anyway, it can't hurt to ask about it.

It's only 10:30, but I think it's time to turn in, maybe listen to some music. I'd like to read (I renewed Hollow City by Ransom Riggs, and I'm over halfway through it), but I'm just a bit too tired, I think. Good night.

Interesting on several levels

Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children's genes: New finding is clear example in humans of the theory of epigenetic inheritance: the idea that environmental factors can affect the genes of your children

Genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors are capable of being passed on to their children, the clearest sign yet that one person’s life experience can affect subsequent generations.

The conclusion from a research team at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital led by Rachel Yehuda stems from the genetic study of 32 Jewish men and women who had either been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, witnessed or experienced torture or who had had to hide during the second world war.

They also analysed the genes of their children, who are known to have increased likelihood of stress disorders, and compared the results with Jewish families who were living outside of Europe during the war. “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents,” said Yehuda.

Her team’s work is the clearest example in humans of the transmission of trauma to a child via what is called “epigenetic inheritance” - the idea that environmental influences such as smoking, diet and stress can affect the genes of your children and possibly even grandchildren.

I may request this through interlibrary loan, assuming I can begin to understand it.

Hmmm....

Study Reveals Genetic Path of Modern Britons

In A.D. 410, Roman authority in Britain collapsed and Romano-British society disappeared from history under the invading tides of Angles and Saxons from northern Europe. Historians have been debating ever since whether the Romano-British were wiped out or survived by adopting their conquerors’ language and culture.

A fine-scale genetic analysis of the British population has now provided the answer. The invaders and the existing population lived side by side and eventually intermarried extensively. The people of south and central England are now genetically well mixed, with Saxon genes accounting for only about 20 percent of the mix, says a genetics team led by Stephen Leslie of the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Victoria, Australia, and by Peter Donnelly and Walter Bodmer of Oxford University.

DNA study shows Celts are not a unique genetic group

A DNA study of Britons has shown that genetically there is not a unique Celtic group of people in the UK.

According to the data, those of Celtic ancestry in Scotland and Cornwall are more similar to the English than they are to other Celtic groups.

The study also describes distinct genetic differences across the UK, which reflect regional identities.

And it shows that the invading Anglo Saxons did not wipe out the Britons of 1,500 years ago, but mixed with them.

I found this very interesting

24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.

The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population.

Granted, it's one skeleton's DNA, but it is definitely worth more research, I think.

Cool

Origin of the Romani People Pinned Down

Europe's largest minority group, the Romani, migrated from northwest India 1,500 years ago, new genetic study finds.

The Romani, also known as the Roma, were originally dubbed "gypsies" in the 16th century, because this widely dispersed group of people were first thought to have come from Egypt. Today, many consider "gypsy" to be a derogatory term.

The Indian theory has been around for awhile, but has now been backed up through genetic testing. The Romany people have suffered discrimination throughout Europe and, like the Jews, were targeted by the Nazis during World War II and sent to death camps. In some post-war Communist countries, there was forced sterilisation. Even outside Europe there is a lot of prejudice against the group. The phrase 'I was gypped', for example, comes from the term 'gypsy' and relates to the perception of thievery and trickery of the often nomadic people. This, to my mind, is as offensive as the phrase 'to jew a deal', which is used to a lesser extent by the ignorant around here and beyond. Most people know enough not to use the latter expression. They don't realise the origin of the former, though, and the Romany are sparse enough here that thoughtless words don't get corrected. While I never heard the latter phrase growing up, I did grow up with the former, and I try to make sure I do not use it.

When I was a kid

There was a young girl I met at church one Sunday. She was a classmate of mine, but she'd been absent a lot and I'd never really gotten to know her. By that Wednesday she was dead, bleeding as a consequence of the leukaemia she'd been fighting with the help of St Jude's Hospital in Memphis. She was my about my age--9 years old.

It was the first time I'd heard of leukaemia, and the very first time it really hit me that little kids get sick and die. It was a profound kind of thing, the sort of thing that hits you in the gut and changes your outlook bit by bit.

These days, thanks to researchers and clinicians at places like St Jude's and others, childhood leukaemia is much more survivable than it was then. But it--or for that matter, any form of cancer--can still be a devastating disease for anyone, child or adult.

So I found this story of interest:

In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future

What is important, medical researchers say, is the genes that drive a cancer, not the tissue or organ — liver or brain, bone marrow, blood or colon — where the cancer originates.

One woman’s breast cancer may have different genetic drivers from another woman’s and, in fact, may have more in common with prostate cancer in a man or another patient’s lung cancer.

Under this new approach, researchers expect that treatment will be tailored to an individual tumor’s mutations, with drugs, eventually, that hit several key aberrant genes at once. The cocktails of medicines would be analogous to H.I.V. treatment, which uses several different drugs at once to strike the virus in a number of critical areas.

In 1976 this would sound like science fiction, up there with the flying cars. Tailoring medicine to your genes? And now it's achieving reality. It amazes me what scientific breakthroughs have come about in my lifetime. It really is exciting to watch. This is a good time to live in, I believe. I don't have utter faith in science, by any means. It's a double-edged sword. But with every discovery we get closer to understanding how things work, and that's great, but also we can apply it to real-life situations make a difference on a smaller, yet equally important scale, or could save greater numbers or whole species.

And there's this...

New Drug Trial Seeks to Stop Alzheimer’s Before It Starts

Most participants will come from the world’s largest family to experience Alzheimer’s, an extended clan of 5,000 people who live in Medellín, Colombia, and remote mountain villages outside that city. Family members with a specific genetic mutation begin showing cognitive impairment around age 45, and full dementia around age 51, debilitated in their prime working years as their memories fade and the disease quickly assaults their ability to move, eat, speak and communicate.

Three hundred family members will participate in the initial trial. Those with the mutation will be years away from symptoms, some as young as 30.

“Because of this study, we do not feel as alone,” said Gladys Betancur, 39, a family member. Her mother died of Alzheimer’s, three of her siblings already have symptoms, and she had a hysterectomy because of her fears that she has the mutation and would pass it on to her children. “Sometimes we think that life is ending, but now we feel that people are trying to help us.”

An interesting line of investigation

I spent much of my childhood battling strep infections. I don't know if my OCD is related to this, but the idea that it could be is pretty intriguing. (I wasn't diagnosed as a child, though I had some symptoms then. I might check with my mom and see what she remembers.)

Childhood disorder prompts study of infection link to mental illness

Brody Kennedy was a typical sixth-grader who loved to hang out with friends in Castaic and play video games. A strep-throat infection in October caused him to miss a couple of days of school, but he was eager to rejoin his classmates, recalls his mother, Tracy.

Then, a week after Brody became ill, he awoke one morning to find his world was no longer safe. Paranoid about germs and obsessed with cleanliness, he refused to touch things and showered several times a day. His fear prevented him from attending school, and he insisted on wearing nothing but a sheet or demanding that his mother microwave his clothes or heat them in the dryer before dressing.

So began a horrific battle with a sudden-onset mental illness that was diagnosed as pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcus, or PANDAS. The puzzling name describes children who have obsessive-compulsive disorder that occurs suddenly — and often dramatically — within days or weeks of a simple infection, such as strep throat.

Here are a couple of other interesting articles about causes of abnormal psychophysiology:

Scans Show Brain Damage in Abused Teens

Adolescents reporting a history of abuse -- even nonphysical forms such as emotional neglect -- had deficits in gray-matter brain volume in numerous regions compared with other teens, researchers said.

Among 42 teens without psychiatric diagnoses, scores on the self-reported Childhood Trauma Questionnaire were inversely correlated with gray-matter volume in brain regions including the prefrontal cortex, striatum, amygdala, and cerebellum, as well as cortical regions associated with sensory function, according to Hilary P. Blumberg, MD, of Yale University, and colleagues.

Moreover, the specific patterns of gray-matter deficit measured via high resolution MRI varied according to the type of abuse participants reported, the researchers indicated in the December issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

ADHD - Four Genes Linked To The Disorder

Four gene variants, all members of the glutamate receptor gene family, appear to be involved in vital brain signaling pathways in a sub-set of children with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), researchers from the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia reported in the journal Nature Genetics.

I really love this quote I came across today

From How to Build a Chickenosaurus: Extinction doesn't have to be forever, according to a renowned dinosaur expert visiting UK

"Kids really like dinosaurs, and the really neat thing is, kids can understand what I talk about," Horner explained. "They know more about dinosaurs than adults do. Sometimes, if I get too many adults in the lecture hall, I have to dumb it down."

Jack Horner is giving a talk at the University of Kentucky on genetic engineering of dinosaurs from their modern-day descendants--birds. The lecture is based on his book, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to Be Forever. It's at 7:30 pm on Thursday, February 10th, at the Singletary Center for the Arts, and is free.

If I left work a little early, I could go to it. Hmmm....

Huh! Who knew?

Australia's marsupials 'have American roots'

The characteristic koalas, kangaroos, possums and wombats of Australia share a common American ancestor, according to genetic research from Germany.

A University of Muenster team drew up a marsupial family tree based on DNA.

Writing in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology journal, they suggest a single marsupial species moved from the Americas to Australia.

Marsupials differ from other mammals in that mothers carry their young in a pouch after birth.

As well as the familiar Australian species, the family includes the opossums and shrew opossums of North and South America, and also has a presence in Asian countries including Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

"I think this is pretty strong evidence now for the hypothesis of a single migration [to Australia] and a common ancestor," said Juergen Schmitz, one of the research team

An interesting study in historical genetics

HIV dates back to around 1900, study shows

Scientists have take three samples: One from the earliest known infection in the US--1981, one from the earliest known infection in Africa--1959, and lymph node tissue from a woman who died in Africa in 1960, and have traced through the mutations to a time period between 1884 and 1924. The study suggests that the building of colonial cities at the time allowed the virus to take hold, as there was a higher, urban population and prostitution to help its spread. They believe AIDS was not initially recognised at that time because of the general conditions in colonial Africa and the many Africans who died of diseases and wasting at that time.

Isn't it cute?

Pint-sized primates were first in North America: Leaping, furry mini-monkeys crossed Bering land bridge long before humans

Check out the page above for a drawing of Teilhardina magnoliana, a tiny primate (weighing about one ounce) whose fossil remains have been unearthed near Meridian, Mississipi (which is kind of funny, because they crossed the Bering Strait, as did the American Indians, and I know someone from Meridian who believes in parallel co-evolution of races. Of course, he's also blond, blue-eyed, and keeps doing creative genealogical math to prove he's more and more Indian than he really is. and muttering about what the White Man did to his ancestors, totally ignoring that he's more white than Indian. But I'll reserve judgement on the town for crazy factor and not just base my opinion on Mike.)

Speaking of blonds/blondes (one is masculine, one is feminine, just for those of you confused by proper English--nowadays it often seems to be used randomly regardless of gender, mostly as 'blonde'), there was a blonde hoax a few years ago claiming that natural blondes would die out in a few years. Several news agencies were taken in by the story, including the BBC. I guess they didn't really do their basic genetics portion of high school biology.

Cool (so long as you're not related to them)

Colon cancer risk traced to common ancestor, a married couple who came from England in 1630. Researches were able to gather information from the Mormon genealogical records in Utah to study a family in that state who has a mutation making them more likely to have attenuated familial adenomatous polyposis (AFAP), which makes you have a 2/3 higher chance of colon cancer than the rest of the population. They've identified a New York branch of the family as well, although they're not releasing the names of the couple.

Apparently it wasn't just an isolated idea

Time magazine's Laura Blue offers a look into past remarks by James Watson, the Nobel Laureate and geneticist. Apparently he's made some remarks that were pretty out there throughout his life. The racist remarks for which he is currently being grilled over the coals for were made to a British newspaper; they caused such a furor that after several of his engagements were cancelled by those who had invited him to speak in promotion of his book Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science he cancelled the rest and returned home, where he's been suspended from administrative duties at his lab.

The Mortification of James Watson