http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061123115741.htm

This seems for me a great chanche for distributed computing to help wit computional calculations to find patterns in DNA-sequences ?

And it's discovered by Howard Hughes Institute, they also support Rosetta@Home.

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What I wonder is: with that range of variation, how much variation occurs in ourselves compared to our parents and siblings?

When you take a genetic "fingerprint", you just look exclusively at certain, reliable genetic positions ("gene loci") that will, under normal conditions, not differ from the genetic material inherited from our parents. So variation is kind of excluded systematically and the method does not tell anything about true variability.

Does the variation take place in everybody by individual mechanisms, e.g. by copying errors during the production of our germ cells, or is it strictly a question of inheritance after random and rare mutations that add up in your bloodline? To clarify that question one would have to make a screening with numerous groups of related people and then sort it out. Probably data that need massive computing power.

Fascinating new results.

Howard Hughes Press Release

A lot of more detailed information about the way of working and results.

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"What I wonder is: with that range of variation, how much variation occurs in ourselves compared to our parents and siblings?"


This is an interesting question that I have been asking myself for a long time too. I assume that you are talking about variation at the genotypic level. It is a difficult question for me to even begin to try to answer for several reasons. First, I am not sure how to quantify the answer. Second, we have things (e.g. viruses) over time that have intercalated into our DNA and changed it over long periods of time which would then beg the question what base standard would we use to determine if an area in the DNA is mutated? Another question I ask myself is at what point in our life do we analyze our DNA for mutations? There are some "good" mutations (our immune system is one of many) as well as bad mutations (cancer is one of many). Also, we inheret our mitochondria differently than the rest of our DNA which makes comparison to our siblings even harder. There are many other questions as well. This is dangerous to say in science, but I do not think it is possible to get a COMPLETE answer to the question you mentioned. However, if one believes in intelligent design, then this question does not even need to be answered because only the "omniscient creator" knows.


What do you think?

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