IGSP News Stories

In the best-case scenario, mutations revealed by exome sequencing suggest a treatment, as it did for the 4-year-old. But that may be unusual. “We can’t treat most of the Mendelian diseases we know about, so we won’t be able in the near and medium term to treat most of the cases that are diagnosed by sequencing,“ says David Goldstein, PhD, director of the center for human genome variation at Duke and an ...

Being maltreated as a child can perhaps affect you for life. It now seems the harm might reach into your very DNA. Two recently published studies found evidence of changes to the genetic material in people with experience of maltreatment. These are the tip of an iceberg of discoveries in the still largely mysterious field of “epigenetic” epidemiology—the alteration of gene expression in ways that ...

A team of four students graduating this week tackled the idea as part of a capstone senior project in the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. The team presented their findings last week to a small seminar that included IGSP Director Hunt Willard and a slightly intimidating handful of professors and a vice president.

I live near Rougemont, North Carolina, a hamlet where the road widens a bit as you travel from Durham north toward the Virginia state line. It’s where the more cosmopolitan Research Triangle fades into the North Carolina Piedmont and dissolves into what some know as The Real North Carolina.

Mohamed Noor wasn’t a stellar student at the College of William and Mary in Virginia—until he enrolled in his first genetics class. “I actually put off taking genetics until junior year because people talked about how hard it was,” says Noor. “Then I took it, and I was shocked that it wasn’t hard at all. It was interesting.”