Neurex in Basel

So I am back from the Neurex meeting in Basel. My story was on the side of gene expression, but most of the talk's contents were orbiting around genome-wide association studies, what means mainly applying SNP microarrays to explain psychical disorders. It was interesting to learn for how much of psychical qualities we may blame genes. For instance, a longitudinal study on Dutch twins shown that behavioral disorders may be explain up to 70% by genes in 5 year old children, but then, the influence of education and environment decreases it to some 40% in 18 year old people. Another interesting thing was that the borderline personality correlates between spouses as much as between siblings. And other phenomena such as depression, bipolar disease and even the agreeability is greatly determined by genes - and we start to discover specific markers. 

Everyone was staying silent about the next-generation sequencing, so I started this topic by the end of the whole meeting, although it turned out to be highly controversial, especially knowing that the lunch was sponsored by our friends from Affymetrix. 

Linkage disequlibrium leads to negative results in genetics?

Linkage disequilibrium is a method used to discover associations between alleles. It seems to be based upon simple difference between the probability of a combination alleles and the probability under independence assumption. So - some researchers took their favourite alleles, found associated ones and... got nothing. But it seems to be still enough to publish:

We did not find the deletion or any
of the STR alleles to be in linkage disequilibrium with the 2-marker haplotype,
which was associated with dyslexia in our sample.

The polymorphisms of GRIN2B gene analysed in this study are not likely to be associated with bipolar disorder.

Both negative, both in psychiatry journal. Perhaps a coincidence... Next month
I'll go to a neuroscience-related event (the last speaker's name looks strangely familiar...) maybe I'll learn more.

Still, there is a Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine . It even navigates towards having an impact factor. I need to redirect some of my users there :)