Biology Aspect

Hey! So in order to make it easier and more accessible, we have moved all discussion surrounding the "Biology Aspect" of our potential project to this page.

'''Enjoy! '''

If you would like to see any personal thoughts apart from our basic info, check out the various talk pages :)

Looking into Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is a late-onset disease that may be of interest, as it is both polygenic and includes behavioral/environment risk. Janssens and van Duijn point out that rather than being predictive, genes contributing to heart disease and diabetes can lead to behavioral changes which try to lower risk of developing the disease.

Prior to this, Weedon et al. showed that having multiple allele copies increases risk in accordance with a multiplicative model (this type of statistical information can be used in affirming the effectiveness of our modeling). However, other studies such as here and here  found that lifestyle/phenotypic factors and family history were more predictive that genetics in whether someone would actually develop diabetes.

Looking into Pharmacogenetics


 * I found this cool article Pharmacogenomics: Tanslating Functional Genomics into Rational Theraputics| that would really help out with the pharmacogenetics project :D


 * If we look at table 1, we find a list of polymorphisms of genes important to drug metabolism, and how they would effect different phenotypes. We could start immediately searching for these polymorphisms in the genomes entered as input and scan for these specific mutations, thus being able to readily point spew out a phenotype


 * Perhaps in order to make our searching method more efficient, we could first look for genes involved in the most number of pathways such as CYP3A4, and look for mutations in those, and then work our way from most common to least common. It is nice that in this picture we can start looking at genes in terms of frequency


 * Another interesting find in this article was that pharmacogenetic polymorphisms differ in frequency among ethnic and racial groups. So now we would know to include these as a primary criteria when we choose to look at external factors