Daily Data Dump - Friday

Have a good weekend. The ratio of human X chromosome to autosome diversity is positively correlated with genetic distance from genes. This is in my RSS, but not on the Nature site, so here's the snip I have: "The ratio of X-linked to autosomal diversity was estimated from an analysis of six human genome sequences and found to deviate from the expected value of 0.75. However, the direction of this deviation depends on whether a particular sequence is close to or far from the nearest gene. This pattern may be explained by stronger locally acting selection on X-linked genes compared with autosomal genes, combined with larger effective population sizes for females than for males." Looks interesting. Journal: Hauser fabricated data. Scientists can be "too big fail" it seems. Epistasis: Obstacle or Advantage for Mapping Complex Traits? They argue that it's an advantage, and you can squeeze more juice by taking into account gene-gene interactions. Genome-wide association study identifies variants in the CFH region associated with host susceptibility to meningococcal disease. There's a model that unexpected deaths from infections which should be benign or asymptomatic are actually due to genetic variation. Specifically, these deaths run in families. Was there a time when everyone was symptomatic? It seems that this is a case where looking at indigenous populations who haven't been as exposed to pathogens would be of interest. Does Your Language Shape How You Think? It seems more a matter of degree if so.