Congratulations to Joel on the publication of this paper in AJHG. He shows that polygenic scores derived from different quantiles of a phenotype differ, and uses this to come up with an interesting and novel test for confounds and GxE.

RT @AlexTISYoung: In March last year, at the age of 35, I was diagnosed with advanced stage III rectal cancer with a metastasis in my liver….

Ever wanted to understand the relationship between genetics, sociology, economics, psychology, epidemiology, neuroscience, and ethics? Now's your chance, with the greatest line of speakers we could put together. Best GRC meeting ever! June this year:.

Latest piece in the Chinese diary series by Long Ling now out in the LRB.

RT @TheHongLab: We are excited to share our latest work showing that mice display rescue-like prosocial behavior toward unresponsive partne….

RT @caina89: New year new start! My group has moved to @ETH_BSSE in @ETH_en - very excited to work with new colleagues here! We’re also hir….

Our paper describing how voice recordings can be used to predict who has major depressive disorder is now out in Molecular Psychiatry.

A paper from Noah Zaitlen quantifies the genome-wide contribution of genetic variation to drug response, identify genes driving this variation and explores the effect on polygenic scores

Great paper from my colleague @chongyuanluo combining single cell HiC and single cell methylation data to reveal an unexpected amount of methylation and chromatin conformation remodelling during human perinatal development.

Great work from Andrew Schork.

RT @LiatShenhav: 🧵 Exciting news! Our paper, "Microbial colonization programs are structured by breastfeeding and guide healthy respiratory….

RT @David_J_Adams: Congrats to @RebecaOLE_ and Andrew Waters for delivering this one. Thanks also to the patients and our team collaborator….

So the some of the same genetic loci affect voice pitch in tonal and non-tonal languages. We don't know why that should be , but assume it has something to do with the non-linguistic production of speech, perhaps anatomical variation that changes pitch.

Surprisingly, to me at least, the association was present. Here is the Manhattan plot of a meta-analysis of the Chinese and Icelandic samples

The icelandic group had published an association between variants near the ABCC9 gene and voice pitch last year and we wondered whether the association would be found in Mandarin Chinese speakers, where pitch conveys meaning.

Our paper on genetic mapping voice features is now online:.

The results of the epigenetic data are intriguing, and may point to new ways of thinking about the relationship between sequence variants, genes and behavior. We'll have to see what the next experiments show.

And the results did find some new biology: four genes, Lamp, Ptprd, Nptx2, and Sh3gl, have known roles in synapse function; the fifth, Psip1, was not previously implicated in behavior; and the sixth is a long non-coding RNA, 4933413L06Rik, of unknown function.

Overall, we found that the complementation test can be applied relatively easily (some complications and concerns are raised in the paper).

You can alter the speed and number of cars, but altering the traffic lights is going to very disruptive, as most of us have experienced. So perhaps genetic effects are constrained in the same way.