The Brief History of Human Evolution
Lately, genome-wide association studies are popping up everywhere. Just scanning through the latest Nature Genetics, almost half of the articles are such linkage studies. The studies represent one of the greatest convergences of population genetics, fundamental molecular biology, the human genome project, the HapMap project, disease biology, and microarray technology.
Leonid Kruglyak has a great review article out in Nature Reviews Genetics on the history and development of such genome-wide studies.
I think these kinds of studies will eventually have the potential to revolutionize medical diagnostics and drug therapy, since it’ll become easier and easier to figure out risk factors for disease and tailor drug therapies to the specific risk categories a patient falls into. I’m really excited to see how this field progresses, especially when newer technologies arise for rapid sequencing of genomes!
