I went to a lecture this week by Dr. Potash called "Searching High and Low for Bipolar Disorder Genes." It was especially interesting to me because my first project at U of M is a study attempting to identify genes for this disorder as well. He gave an overview of the work that has been done in the past as well as the work being attempted by his team and ours.
Human DNA is really just a long chain of molecules. Researchers hope to determine which molecules in which positions cause certain illnesses. The current study design of choice is called a genome-wide association study (GWA). This involves looking at just 1 million of the roughly 3 billion molecules at certain positions in the chain. Researchers only look at a subset of the positions because looking at the whole whole chain (a process called whole genome re-sequencing, or WGR) is prohibitively expensive right now. Nevertheless, even just those 1 million samples are enough to help narrow down potential problem zones.
The most interesting part for me is that while WGR currently costs around $10 million per person, Dr. Potash said that within the next 5-7 years that prices will come down to something closer to $1,000 per sample. This means that in the next few years that i will be working on my PhD, WGR will become a practical tool of study and our ability to detect problem DNA sequences will greatly increase. This really is an amazing time for medicine and a great time to be a biostatiscian.
Posted by Matthew at July 14, 2007 07:13 PM