INTERESTING TIMES

It's a free, online, educational event about how to interpret and act on your own genotypes.  There will be some fascinating lectures here, and some very basic ones.  I definitely want to hear the one about ketogenic diet.  You can sign up here.

EDIT: I did listen to one lecture per day, or at least part of each one.  Genetics and Epigenetics since it became a thing have been an interest of mine.  The programs were oriented at the general public, and I garnered no new information.  I was hoping that it would go a little deeper and nerdier for me.  Would be very useful for folks who are just getting introduced to the significance of modern science with regard to their genetic makeup and health.  Lots of correlates.  Very interesting.

The funny thing is that the clinicians all say the same thing, that your SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) for the most part won't do you harm if you keep your general level of physical health strong.  There's a lot of redundancy build into human genetics and systems.  If someone forgets to cross a T somewhere in your genetics, you'll probably be fine, long as you don't wear yourself to a frazzle, skip sleep, and consider trips to the refrigerator to be adequate exercise.

We went to the Mission last night to hear about Viruses from Hell, and it turns out the speaker was a PhD professor who is into viruses that come from acidic hotsprings. He looks a lot like my friend Gordon who is also a brilliant academic--something about that jutting forehead must allow for extra brains. Ken Stedman is a professor at Portland State University who has made a career of viruses. His research has mostly involved examining the genomes of extremophile viruses and comparing them. It was faintly interesting to me--genetics is interesting, and yet I am so homocentric. I really want to know about bacteriophage therapy for healing horrible infections. I want to hear about the evolution of the flu. But his research wasn't about this and his talk was about the questions that will ensure that he gets grants and funding in the future. I couldn't help but to think of the right wing perspective that academics are parasites on society and perform no useful function other than keeping themselves in priuses. There is truth it that, though it is also true that there is nothing more important for our future than to keep investigating our world and what is in it. Scientists have specialized training that makes it possible for them to think of things that I don't have words or concepts for. There is so much more of the world to know about. I am learning this narrow fraction that is medicine, and it is more than I can ever take in. Within that sea I must pick a drop.

Circling back to VIRUSES, I did bring home a few interesting factoids. I call things factoids until they've been demonstrated beyond the shade of MY doubt. He defines viruses in several ways but my favorite was "a capsid encoding organism", also known as a phage. He told us that the major reservoir of viruses on the planet is in seawater, though they infect everything else that lives. Some 5% of the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced by bacteria that are infected with viruses. The viruses increase the oxygen-production of these microbes. I learned that 10% of the human genome is viral---and this is just the ones that have been demonstrated beyond a shade of HIS doubt. Professor Stedman said that up to 43% of the human genome could be viral, and that many of the genes we got from viruses are important ones, without which we would not be here. Apparently all placental mammals share one particular viral gene so it got in there a long time ago.

One of the main points that Professor Stedman made was how much of the world is made up of viruses, and how small they are. He said that if you put all the Earth's viruses end to end the lineup would reach to the Andromeda Galaxy. And they'd weigh more than some huge number of whales, and so on.

One nice thing about going to science pubs is being around people for whom evolution just is, instead of having to debate about it. It makes me realize how much energy I put into defending a basic scientific mindset. Too many groovy spiritual people and homeopaths in my life. They stress me out.

For today my mantra is "it is OK to do nothing" and I have been enjoying it. I need to take breaks more often. And journal. Just for me.

Not sure what to make of this:
http://altering-perspectives.com/2014/02/dna-analysis-elongated-skull-released-results-incredible.html

Sounds like the creatures who had elongated hominid skulls found in Peru were genetically quite different from homo sapiens.

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to "pure" fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties. Many genetically minded historians believe that the confluence of urban living and the discovery of alcohol created a massive selection pressure on the genes of all humans who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Alcohol, after all, is a deadly poison and notoriously addictive. To digest large quantities of it, you need to be able to boost production of enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases, a trait regulated by a set of genes on chromosome four in human DNA. Many early agrarians lacked that trait, and thus were genetically incapable of "holding their liquor." Consequently, many of them died childless at an early age, either from alcohol abuse or from waterborne diseases. Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol. (The same is true of lactose tolerance, which went from a rare genetic trait to the mainstream among descendants of the herders, thanks to domestication of livestock.) The descendants of hunter gatherers--like many Native Americans or Australian Aborigines--were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today they show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak "Indian constitution" to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance most likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn't live in towns."
--Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map, pages 103-4.

http://www.nature.com/news/a-trip-to-the-gym-alters-dna-1.10176

a trip to the gym alters DNA

FASCINATING FACTOID:
12% of caucasians (Zwickey) are immune to HIV because they are descended from bubonic plague survivors. The Black Death had a 90% death rate and killed 147 million people. It swept Europe 3 times, in the 6th, 14th and 17th centuries. Those who survived (natural selection) don't have a certain chemokine receptor (CCR5) which is necessary for HIV to get into host macrophages. This may explain why some partners of HIV positive people never get the disease even though they do not practice "safe" sex.
( lots of info here )

27 multiple guess, a single best answer, one on population genetics
5 short answer
one longer question: draw a pedigree, 10-12 people
a few more questions, extra credit, requiring creativity, one on population genetics
not much math, should be able to do in head
remember sample question #4, that one is good tester for how you will do
do sample questions, they're harder than the test
no need to know which xsm a gene is on other than autosomal vs sex xsm
know top 3-4 dz for each inheritance type
if not told much about a person you must make real world assumptions
for all my notes from the class see these posts: http://liveonearth.livejournal.com/tag/genetics
( notes from review )