Beneath the surface. Even though the comprehensiveness of next generation sequencing technologies may suggest that we can capture all the variation in the human genome, there is an entire gray zone of small rearrangements that current technologies are blind to. In a recent publication in the American Journal of Human Genetics, Brand and collaborators now use a novel technology to explore the twilight zone of genomics, the realm of small deletions, duplication, inversions and cryptic complex rearrangements. Continue reading
Tag Archives: duplication
When mutations are outside genes: a crime story
CSI Genetics. A headline in the recent issue of Nature Genetics caught my eye the other day: “Hereditary mixed polyposis syndrome is caused by a 40-kb upstream duplication […]”. Two thoughts went through my head when I read this headline. First, I was wondering how the authors actually found this upstream duplication (one of the last things you look for). Secondly, I realised that demonstrating causality of this duplication must have been very, very difficult. In fact, the paper by Jaeger and colleagues reads like a good detective story and tells several lessons that might apply to EuroEPINOMICS. Continue reading
