BIOINFORMATICS-THE FUTURE

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Bioinformatics : The importance of gene regulation for common human disease

Source: sanger.ac.uk

Genes and disease? It's what you do with what you haveA new study published in Nature Genetics on Sunday 16 September 2007 show that common, complex diseases are more likely to be due to genetic variation in regions that control activity of genes, rather than in the regions that specify the protein code.

This surprising result comes from a study at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of the activity of almost 14,000 genes in 270 DNA samples collected for the HapMap Project. The authors looked at 2.2 million DNA sequence variants (SNPs) to determine which affected gene activity.

They found that activity of more than 1300 genes was affected by DNA sequence changes in regions predicted to be involved in regulating gene activity, which often lie close to, but outside, the protein-coding regions.

"We predict that variants in regulatory regions make a greater contribution to complex disease than do variants that affect protein sequence," explained Dr Manolis Dermitzakis, senior author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "This is the first study on this scale and these results are confirming our intuition about the nature of natural variation in complex traits.

"One of the challenges of large-scale studies that link a DNA variant to a disease is to determine how the variant causes the disease: our analysis will help to develop that understanding, a vital step on the path from genetics to improvements in healthcare.

"Past studies of rare, monogenic disease, such as cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anaemia, have focused on changes to the protein-coding regions of genes because they have been visible to the tools of human genetics. With the HapMap and large-scale research methods, researchers can inspect the role of regions that regulate activity of many thousands of genes.

The HapMap Project established cell cultures from participants from four populations as well as, for some samples, information from families, which can help to understand inheritance of genetic variation.

The team used these resources to study gene activity in the cell cultures and tie that to DNA sequence variation‘We have generated an information resource readily available to investigators working in the mapping of variants underlying complex traits. Regions of association can be correlated with signatures of regulatory regions affecting gene expression' explained Dr Panos Deloukas, Senior Investigator at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

"We found strong evidence that SNP variation close to genes - where most regulatory regions lie - could have a dramatic effect on gene activity," said Dr Barbara Stranger, post-doctoral fellow at WT Sanger Institute. "Although many effects were shared among all four HapMap populations, we have also shown that a significant number were restricted to one population.

"They also showed that genes required for the basic functions of the cell - so-called housekeeping genes - were less likely to be subject to genetic variation. "This was exactly as we would expect: you can't mess too much with the fundamental life processes and we predicted we would find reduced effects on these genes," said Dr Dermitzakis.

The study also detected SNP variants that affect the activity of genes located a great distance away. Genetic regulation in the human genome is complex and highly variable: a tool to detect such distant effects will expand the search for causative variants. The authors note, however, that the small sample size of 270 HapMap individuals is sensitive enough to detect only the strongest effects.The results of this study are becoming available in public databases such as Ensembl for researchers to use.

The paper is accompanied by two others examining effects of changes to regulatory DNA in samples from asthma and from heart study patients.

Salaries for Jobs in Genetics-amazed!!

An extract from eyeondna.com

According to myDanwei, “a a pioneer of developing the next generation organization, people, salary, and job information searching and data mining platforms,” here are some current genetics salaries in biotechnology companies:

• Microarray Software Engineer - $88,400
• Statistical Genetics Analyst - $85,000
• Senior Scientist - $95,000
• Bioinformatics Research Associate - $68,000
• Bioinformatics Scientist - $88,400
• Cytogenetic Technologist - $50,320
• Molecular Genetics clinical Lab Scientist - $59,987
• Genetic Counselor - $54,600

Here are some more genetics salaries from Indeed.com which pegs the average earnings of someone working in

• genetics at $57,000.
• Genetics Counselor - $53,000
• Research Geneticist - $86,000
• Molecular Biology Research Associate - $45,000
• Biotech Technical Writer - $75,000
• Cytogenetic Technologist - $42,000

What do you think? Do these salaries make you want to join the genetics work force?

Career path in Bioinformatics

When people refer to the field of bioinformatics, they’re usually referring to two overlapping areas. The first is what you would call “bioinformatics”, which is more technical, and examples are creating tools to analyse data for biologists, or specific databases to store and retrieve information. For example if you created a new tool that could analyse microarray data in a way that hasn’t been done previously, then this is bioinformatics. Many journals such as Nature and Bioinformatics, have sections purely for articles about new methods and tools.

The second path is what you might call “computational biology”, which is all about doing biological research, using a computer instead of a pipette. A strong understanding of biology is important, as well as the ability to phrase, then answer a research question. For example, if you believed that duplicate genes were less well conserved compared with non duplicates, and you tested this hypothesis across a set of genomes, then this would be computational biology.

These two fields are not distinct, and overlap a fair amount. Some universities have bioinformatics departments in both the computer science and life science faculties, indicating the type of research carried out in each.

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