POTW: January, 2012 choices

Three papers published last month that I found to be of interest are listed here. These are:

The mystery of missing heritability: Genetic interactions create phantom heritability, by Zuk, et al. This addresses the missing heritability question, suggesting that "the total heritability may be much smaller and thus the proportion of heritability explained much larger."

Characterisation and discovery of novel miRNAs and moRNAs in JAK2V617F mutated SET2 cells, by Botoluzzi, et al. What interested me in this article was the generation of novel microRNAs that were induced by the cancerous state triggered by this JAK2 variant. This indicates to me that the microRNA realm is broad and rich with many as yet undiscovered relationships.

The PLoS One paper entitled "Genetic signatures of exceptional longevity in humans," by Sebastiani, et al. We here were very curious how this was different from the version retracted from Science and what findings are now reported. TOMM40 near APOE is indeed interesting.