SARAH BAY, PHD

Highlights

“Predicting” the future: how genomic prediction methods anticipated technology

When a new technology is developed, it can allow scientists to make great strides in addressing longstanding questions. Occasionally, however, researchers think so critically about a knowledge gap in their field that they’re able to propose a new methodology that anticipates the technology needed to make it a reality.

This is precisely what Theo Meuwissen, Ben Hayes, and Mike Goddard accomplished with their 2001 paper Prediction of Total Genetic Value Using Genome-Wide Dense Marker Maps. In it, they laid out a framework for predicting breeding values from genome-wide marker information, using simulated data to compare different approaches. The catch? There wasn’t a way to do what they were proposing—the technology didn’t exist yet.

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Family tree of 400 million people shows genetics has limited influence on longevity

Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously estimated, according to a new analysis published in GENETICS.  Ruby et al. used a data set of over 400 million historical persons obtained from public pedigrees on Ancestry.com to estimate the heritability of life span, finding it to be well below 10%.

“We can potentially learn many things about the biology of aging from human genetics, but if the heritability of life span is low it tempers our expectations about what types of things we can learn and how easy it will be,” says lead author Graham Ruby (Calico Life Sciences). “It helps contextualize the questions that scientists studying aging can effectively ask.”

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A modern look at ancient DNA

Well over 15,000 years ago, a man and a bear died in a cave in the Jura Mountains in modern-day Switzerland. That was the end of the story for millennia—until their remains were discovered in 1954 by researchers investigating the cave. Further work in the 1990s uncovered the fact that the man had, in fact, shot the bear with an arrow. This established their bond beyond a coincidentally shared grave, identifying the man as a hunter-gatherer. Now, thousands upon thousands of years after he lived, geneticists are developing new methods to analyze this hunter-gatherer’s DNA in an effort to better understand genetic diversity in ancient humans—and how that compares to our diversity today.

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Steering the biomedical workforce away from the iceberg

In 2014, Bruce Alberts, Marc Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus published an article in PNAS detailing the pitfalls and challenges of the structure of the biomedical workforce. Though many have written about and discussed these problems before, people seemed to pay attention to the conversation this time. Scientists at all stages of their careers started having discussions, planning workshops, writing papers – they got involved.

The 2014 article described the perpetual disequilibrium of the biomedical science workforce pipeline: it generates “an ever-increasing supply of scientists vying for a finite set of research resources and employment opportunities.” In the traditional academic path, students earn PhDs, complete postdoctoral fellowships, and go on to secure tenure-track faculty positions. But it’s become increasingly clear that simply not enough traditional tenure-track faculty jobs exist for the number of new PhDs – by a huge margin.

The past two years have produced a wealth of ideas on how to “turn the Titanic” of biomedical research in the US. The time is ripe for young scientists to help grab the ship’s wheel. To get an idea of how things are progressing and ways graduate students and postdocs can get involved, Genes to Genomes spoke with some of the community leaders who are making waves and pushing for change.

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Authentic ethics in synthetic biology

While the science behind the synthetic yeast genome project is cutting edge, the ethical questions surrounding it aren’t new.

The scientists of the Sc2.0 project have a goal that sounds akin to science fiction – they’re working toward building a completely synthetic yeast genome. This new strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, affectionately named Sc2.0, will be used to study fundamental properties of chromosomes, genome organization, gene content, function of RNA splicing, the extent to which small RNAs play a role in yeast biology, the distinction between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and questions relating to genome structure and evolution. In addition to the hard science, the project faces a series of challenges in setting ethical boundaries, educating policy makers and the public, and building a governance plan.

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Sarah has written under her own byline and as Editorial Staff. She also designed a process to publish a flow of regular scientific writing covering papers published in the GSA Journals GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics. She vetted, assembled, and manages a team of freelance science writers. She identifies papers of interest, issues assignments, and provides both developmental and copy edits during the drafting process.