9 things you didn’t know about bioinformatics

Lessons. Today was the first day of our bioinformatics workshop in Leuven, Belgium. We started out with some basic command line programming and eventually moved on to working with R Studio. What is this all about? It’s about getting some basic understanding of what your computer does and how your computer handles files. It’s about good data and bad data and losing the fear of the command line. We collected responses from the participants today about today’s take home messages. Continue reading

Surrendering to genomic noise – de novo mutations in schizophrenia

Heterogeneity. Family-based exome sequencing or trio exome sequencing for de novo mutations is currently the method of choice to identify genetic risk factors in neurodevelopmental disorders. However, given the increasingly recognized variability in the human genome, the hunt for causative de novo mutations is sometimes an uphill battle – it is impossible to distinguish causal mutations from random events unless genes are affected repeatedly. In a recent publication in Nature, Fromer and colleagues present the most comprehensive search for de novo mutations in schizophrenia to date. They observe an incredible genetic heterogeneity that reflects the genetic architecture of neurodevelopmental disorders. Continue reading