Mailund on the Internet

Now that I am getting into the habit of stealing titles, I’ve done it again. This time from this post that ask that very question.

I am a computer scientist, and I don’t know the answer. Having been educated in a very theoretical computer science department, I would probably group computer science with math (and I do not consider math a science, but it isn’t engineering either). It is not as simple as that, though. Computer science gets its hands in all kinds of things and not always with pure (math) intentions, so who knows what it really is…

I look forward to the rest of the series.

I must confess, I stole the title from a post at Genetic Future, but I think I’ll get away with it since I just linked to the original post ;-)

In this post, Daniel MacArthur discusses genome wide (SNP) association mapping studies and concludes that:

The fact remains that despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on genome-wide association studies, most of the genetic variance in risk for most common diseases remains undiscovered.

He then lists a number of reasons why we have problems with figuring out most of the genetic causes of common diseases, starting with the large multiple testing correction needed when scanning the entire genome, listing also rare variants (we cannot find these with our current approach, but see here for why they could be important), and epistasis.

If you are interested in association mapping, you should read this post.