One of the most famous examples of a gene-environment interaction is being scrutinized by evidence from one of the largest meta-analyses on the subject to date. There have been tons of reports claiming or refuting evidence for a statistically significant interaction between a variant in the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT) and stressful life events and their effect on major depression.

The New York Times published this interesting article on how the ability to design and perform computer simulations is a highly marketable skill for careers across many disciplines.In methodology development we use simulation nearly every day.

Here's a good paper published online this morning in Nature Reviews Genetics. As the title suggests, the paper covers many of the challenges associated with translating molecular genetic tests into clinical practice. There are tons of references to articles on the ethical, legal, and social issues surrounding genetic testing in health management.

I know that a lot of you are scrambling to spend your training grant money by next week. If you think you'll ever need to use R, I strongly recommend buying this book: Introductory Statistics with R, by Peter Dalgaard ($48, Amazon). I picked this up a while back and read through most of it in a day or two.

GWAS reviews are a dime a dozen these days, but I found this one in particular that's a good up-to-date review suitable for people relatively new to the field. While this one has a focus on psychiatric genetics, it has a short summary on topics like positional methods, candidate gene studies, common variation, rare variation, CNVs, GWAS design, and issues concerning power and sample size.

The R journal just published its inaugural peer-reviewed journal. Aligned with the open-source mantra, the journal is free and openly accessible. The journal features short articles on topics focused on R, including notes about new add-on packages, hints for R newcomers, application reports detailing examples of data analysis with R, and other news items.

Nature Reviews Genetics just published an excellent paper on interaction analysis by Heather Cordell. This masterfully written review starts by defining interaction, then delving into strategies to statistically model it in human genetics studies.

Jason Moore at the previously mentioned Epistasis Blog has begun compiling a list of 100 papers every grad student should read, broken down by discipline. Right now the list is in its infancy, but it's a good start. I'll post here when the list is updated again.100 Publications Every Graduate Student Should ReadUPDATE 2009-05-08: The list has grown substantially since yesterday.

Here's a paper in Nature Reviews Genetics highlighting two recently published methods for mapping regulatory sites. Most currently used procedures rely on ChIP, where you can only examine sites one protein at a time.

An international team led by Sarah Tishkoff, in collaboration with our own Scott Williams, and former CHGR member Jason Moore, published yesterday in Science the largest, most comprehensive characterization of genetic variation in over 100 different African populations.