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The advent of genomic technologies is changing health care systems, with genomic data increasingly being applied to guide individual patient care. In this Essay, Rehm discusses how genomics is becoming an essential part of clinical care and the existing challenges that must be surmounted to take full advantage of personal genomic information.
Systems biomedicine seeks to harness the complexity of human molecular physiology in order to move towards quick translation from basic biology to clinical applications. The Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore, Edison T. Liu, describes the advantages of this approach from his personal perspective.
In this Essay, Leonid Kruglyak looks back at the concepts, resources and techniques that laid the necessary foundations for the recent explosion of genome-wide association studies, focusing on the less well-chronicled days before the launch of the HapMap project and speculates about future developments.
Ability to effectively communicate one's research is a vital and highly transferable skill. It is therefore important that young scientists have opportunities to present their doctoral research to large general audiences.
Did the main features of eukaryotes, including endocytosis, develop before the adoption of endosymbionts? Or was their evolution triggered by an interaction between two typical prokaryotic cells, one of which became the host and the other the endosymbiont? Christian de Duve re-examines this important question in the light of cell-biological and phylogenetic data.
The first conference on genetics was held by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1906. A close examination of how this event was organized and how genetic research was done at that time reveals many surprisingly familiar themes.
How were hereditary traits understood before genetics emerged as a field? Insights from science, medicine and agriculture shaped thinking in this area, setting the scene for the crucial advances of Mendel and Darwin in the nineteenth century.
