[HN Gopher] Genome-wide association of musical beat synchronizat...
___________________________________________________________________
Genome-wide association of musical beat synchronization shows high
polygenicity
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 25 points
Date : 2022-09-21 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| dekhn wrote:
| I used to think it was really interesting to attempt to turn all
| the human phenotypes into a list of underlying genotypes.
|
| 23&Me convinced me this process is mostly garbage. If at most you
| can conclude today that a complex phenotype has a complex
| underlying genotype: you're just confirming what we knew two
| decades ago, and not providing any useful answers for how the
| complex phenotypes come about, just that variations of the
| genotype lead to somewhat different outcomes. Totally boring.
| flobosg wrote:
| Related: "The perfect human is Puerto Rican" -
| https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/the-perfect-hum...
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Personally, I find this study boring (or interesting, depending
| on your take) for an entirely different reason: this trait is
| only 15% heritable. Thus, almost all variation in your ability
| to maintain a beat is learned from your environment. There's
| hope for us all!
| mbreese wrote:
| Also -- Even for that 15%, how much of that is also nurture?
| Musical parents rock their kids to a beat, play and sing
| music, etc... I'm not sure if this is mentioned in the study,
| but this would be nearly impossible to control for.
| dekhn wrote:
| This reminds of a previous music study. The professor
| teaching my genetics class in grad school said he thought
| that musical ability was heritable- look at all the children
| of musicians who are good at music! Several of us sort of
| looked at each other like "did he really just say that and
| not think that perhaps exposure to labelled examples during a
| time of neural plasticity would dominate?"
| searine wrote:
| You're assuming that associations to blocks of linked genotype
| is the end of the story.
|
| Yes, an association to a phenotype using data like that sourced
| from 23&me only generally points in the direction of the genes
| and snvs which cause alterations in phenotype, but that is just
| a stepping stone.
|
| It narrows down the search space to about 1-2% of the genome,
| which then follow up studies can fine map. Using high
| resolution data, such as whole-genome or exome sequence, you
| can then pinpoint protein-coding changes which alter phenotype.
| This is what a lot of people are doing right now, using the
| last decade of GWAS results to fine map using WGS.
|
| If you discover exactly how the machine breaks, it is a lot
| easier to fix it, or at least prevent it from getting broken in
| the first place.
|
| It is not a simple as flipping one switch, and it is an
| incremental 'boring' process, but the potential to better
| understand disease today and in the future is worth its weight
| in gold.
| dekhn wrote:
| These are organismal phenotypes which have no direct
| correlate to molecular phenotypes (because they are complex
| and caused by entirely nontrivial developmental processes).
| Even if you knew the proteins involved you couldn't craft a
| realistic model that explained the observed organismal trait
| from the protein variations using any amount of existing
| scientific methods.
|
| Obviously this isn't true for some diseases, such as simple
| mendelian diseases caused by single SNP changes.
|
| I worked in the field for decades and very little progress
| has been made mapping genotype to complex organismal
| phenotypes or appreciating how complex development processes
| are affected by collections of mutations. This specific
| research, even if wildly successful, wouldn't really have
| impact on any significant diseases.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| What? Can somebody decipher the title please?
| dekhn wrote:
| "Company that failed to exploit genotype data to cure disease
| pivots to genetic entertainment."
| kadoban wrote:
| > Genome-wide association study
|
| They looked at what genes are correlated with
|
| > of musical beat synchronization
|
| an ability to keep the beat in music
|
| > demonstrates high polygenicity
|
| and found that it's a trait caused by a bunch of genes in some
| complex makeup, not just one.
| otikik wrote:
| Thanks. It looked like machine -generated nonsense to me.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Makes sense. Thank you very much.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-21 23:01 UTC)