Genetic literacy. Sometimes important milestones don’t feel like much when you eventually reach them. Last Thursday, I woke up sleep-deprived after working on a grant all night and found an NCBI update in my mailbox. Primer Part 2 of the genetic literacy series of ILAE Genetics Commission was now published in Epilepsia and available on PubMed. Finally, both the introductory primers of the genetic literacy series are out – Part 1 dealing with the building blocks including general concepts of epilepsy genetics and epidemiology and now Part 2 about the paradigm shifts that were introduced with the advent of massive parallel sequencing. Both publications were revised and re-written over and over again to fit the overall didactic mission of the literacy series, an effort that takes approximately 10x as long as writing a typical review. But finally, as of May 10, 2018, both Primers are now in their final shape, published and open access to the international epilepsy community. And here is just a quick overview of what this paradigm shift is really about. Continue reading
Tag Archives: KCNQ1
Are there incidental findings in exomes that require immediate action?
Guidelines. High throughput sequencing generates an unprecedented amount of genetic data. Most exomes are generated in a specific context, i.e. the genetic data is screened for variations in specific candidate genes or screened for de novo mutations. However, these approaches only use a small fraction of the genetic data generated per individual. High-throughput sequencing may also reveal clues towards possibly relevant diseases, and there is an ongoing debate if and how incidental findings should be returned to individuals undergoing high-throughput sequencing. Now, a recent paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics uses a very stringent clinical approach to assess the frequency of medically actionable findings in exome data. The results are not what you would think, and there is an urgent need to fix the existing databases. Continue reading
