Comments on: Toward a Genetic Suicide Note http://blogs-r.us/bioblog/2008/10/28/toward-a-genetic-suicide-note/ Biology is everything Mon, 21 May 2012 01:05:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: The Arborist http://blogs-r.us/bioblog/2008/10/28/toward-a-genetic-suicide-note/#comment-34 The Arborist Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:20:50 +0000 http://blogs-r.us/bioblog/?p=80#comment-34 Epigenetics seem to play a role in a lot of things, but it is still hard to understand how something like methylation that can vary a lot with diet and other environmental factors can have such profound phenotypic effects. I haven't read the paper, but it sounds like the classic "correlation is not causation" problem that plagues so much of biological research. It's hard to find brains of pre-depressed people, so it's hard to figure out which came first, the chicken or the histone modification. As usual it doesn't sound like we'll be able to go too much further without generating/finding appropriate animal models or the luck of finding some big family with a crazy genetic disease (eg. high penetrence rare alleles). Oh, and I only found one paper, here's the pubmed link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18639864 Epigenetics seem to play a role in a lot of things, but it is still hard to understand how something like methylation that can vary a lot with diet and other environmental factors can have such profound phenotypic effects. I haven’t read the paper, but it sounds like the classic “correlation is not causation” problem that plagues so much of biological research. It’s hard to find brains of pre-depressed people, so it’s hard to figure out which came first, the chicken or the histone modification.

As usual it doesn’t sound like we’ll be able to go too much further without generating/finding appropriate animal models or the luck of finding some big family with a crazy genetic disease (eg. high penetrence rare alleles).

Oh, and I only found one paper, here’s the pubmed link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18639864

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