GWAS analysis of severe Covid patients implicates a major locus on chromosome 3. The corresponding 50 kb segment appears to originate from Neanderthal/Sapiens crossings, raising interesting evolutionary questions.

The prediction of a person’s aspect from analysis of an anonymous DNA sample has made significant progress in the last decade. Pigmentation (eyes, hair and, more recently, skin colour) can now be determined with good ...

More than 10 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas between 1500 and 1900. Recent genetic studies investigate regional African ancestry components in present-day Africa-Americans, and allow comparison ...

Risk assessment for a cancer type with moderate heritability can be accurately performed using a relatively small number of SNPs detected by GWAS analyses to calculate a polygenic risk score (PRS) that has definite clinical ...

A systematic search for non-conventional open reading frames in human DNA reveals a large number of small ORFs encoding peptides generally smaller than 100 amino-acids. These ORFs are transcribed and translated into small ...

A new company is offering extensive genetic analysis of embryos during an in vitro fertilisation procedure, allowing the derivation of polygenic scores for several diseases and embryo choice based on these results. Polygenic ...

Sophisticated analyses of current human populations compared to a high-coverage Neandertal genome sequence indicate that, contrary to the previous consensus, African genomes carry a small but significant amount of ...

Evidence for a “homosexuality gene” was claimed in the early 1990’s on the basis of linkage studies that, by current criteria, were woefully underpowered. Indeed, follow up studies gave contradictory results. Genome-wide ...

A detailed analysis of the clinical benefit for 47 approved cancer drugs, using two internationally recognized assessment systems, shows essentially no correlation between clinical benefit and weekly treatment costs. This ...