Complexity Strikes Back ... and We're Ready

What with all the talk about gene networks and complexity, some might be tempted to think that genetics is starting over from scratch, and despair that practical medical applications won't ever arrive.

Well, not to worry. Besides the fact that scientists are finally looking in the right place, and have an approach -- whole genome association studies -- that gives them good starting points for exploring disease pathways, there's a few other useful tricks and tools that should hasten the process.

One of these involve gene sequences that are conserved across all vertebrates. Despite being separated by millions of years of evolution, humans share many basic gene chunks with monkeys, mice -- even birds and fish.

Logically, anything that's been preserved intact in wildly different species is pretty fundamental to life, and therefore a good place to look when trying to understand organismal development and functioning.

Another is powerful software and the processors needed to run it. As bioinformatics whiz Joel Graber explained today,

Say you have a mouse that's big, and another that's small. You want to see the genes important to size. Conceptually, that's simple: you take the offspring, see which are big, which alleles come from mom and which from dad, and then ask, what's associated with size? Conceptually, the world understood that a long time ago -- but we didn't have the markers, the ways of identifying inheritance at every chromosome. In the last 10 to 15 years, we've got a lot of genetic markers to sprinkle across the chromosome, and you can do that for a reasonable amount of money. And then mathematicians can have a field day.

Image: The Evolution Project