Tag Archives: genetics

TechCrunch: 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users

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TechCrunch: 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users. “On Friday, genetic testing company 23andMe announced that hackers accessed the personal data of 0.1% of customers, or about 14,000 individuals. The company also said that by accessing those accounts, hackers were also able to access ‘a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry.’ But 23andMe would not say how many ‘other users’ were impacted by the breach that the company initially disclosed in early October. As it turns out, there were a lot of ‘other users’ who were victims of this data breach: 6.9 million affected individuals in total.”

University of California Santa Cruz: New eDNA Explorer provides a powerful new resource for conservation

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University of California Santa Cruz: New eDNA Explorer provides a powerful new resource for conservation. “CALeDNA, a UC-wide consortium project to document California’s biodiversity, has launched a prototype of their new eDNA Explorer. This open-source tool provides a powerful and easily accessible platform for sharing, exploring, and analyzing data from projects that use environmental DNA.”

New York Times: V.A. Recruits Millionth Veteran for Its Genetic Research Database

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New York Times: V.A. Recruits Millionth Veteran for Its Genetic Research Database. This is a gift article and you should be able to read it without paywall. “On Saturday, after a 12-year effort, the Department of Veterans Affairs reached a long-term goal — it enrolled the millionth veteran in a genetic database, the Million Veteran Program. According to the V.A., the Million Veteran Program is the largest such database in the world.”

Poachers beware: New online tool traces illegal lion products back to source (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

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University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Poachers beware: New online tool traces illegal lion products back to source. ” A new conservation tool from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is helping protect lions across Africa, where populations have plummeted in recent decades due to poaching and other factors. With the Lion Localizer and a simple DNA test, authorities can examine the geographic origin of illegally traded teeth, claws, bones, and other body parts from the poached animals.”

North Carolina State University: NC State Researchers Create First Genetic Database of North Carolina Black Bears

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North Carolina State University: NC State Researchers Create First Genetic Database of North Carolina Black Bears . “Using a broad DNA profiling panel for American black bears, researchers from NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine and College of Natural Resources have created the first genetic database for a subsample of North Carolina’s black bear population. The database, which can be used to identify individual bears and localized groups, can help law enforcement and wildlife officials identify bears poached by hunters or involved in human-bear interactions reported to the state.”

National Human Genome Research Institute: NHGRI makes history of genomics special collections available to the public

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National Human Genome Research Institute: NHGRI makes history of genomics special collections available to the public. “The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has created a new publicly available digital archive and search aid for accessing documents related to the history of genomics.”

Jurist: New York high court finds police can search state DNA database for relatives of potential suspects

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Jurist: New York high court finds police can search state DNA database for relatives of potential suspects. “The New York Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that the state legislature authorized the Commission on Forensic Sciences to create rules allowing police to search the state’s DNA database to identify family members of potential suspects. Practically, this means New York police officers can resume using the state’s DNA databank for these types of searches.”

AfricaNews: Project to create the largest database on the African genome

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AfricaNews: Project to create the largest database on the African genome. ” Scientists plan to collect genetic material from 500,000 people of African descent to create what they believe will be the world’s largest database of population genomic information.”

Washington State University: WSU students create database to accelerate skin science

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Washington State University: WSU students create database to accelerate skin science. “The website — skinregeneration.org — was created for researchers but allows anyone to cross-compare information on more than 33,000 genes from different species as they relate to skin development, wound repair, and regeneration. Ultimately, it could help scientists reprogram adult skin for regeneration during wound healing and to inhibit the aging process.”

Creamy or Crunchy: Visualizing Food Protein Structures in Wolfram Language (Wolfram Blog)

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Wolfram Blog: Creamy or Crunchy: Visualizing Food Protein Structures in Wolfram Language. “Explore protein structures with the new Wolfram ProteinVisualization paclet and the BioMoleculePlot3D resource function. Designed for researchers, educators and all structural biology enthusiasts, the paclet offers an immersive experience for viewing the intricate structures of biomolecules, including proteins, nucleic acids and their complexes.”

Introducing Pebblescout: Index and Search Petabyte-Scale Sequence Resources Faster than Ever (National Library of Medicine)

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National Library of Medicine: Introducing Pebblescout: Index and Search Petabyte-Scale Sequence Resources Faster than Ever. “NCBI is excited to introduce Pebblescout, a pilot web service that allows you to search for sequence matches in very large nucleotide databases, such as runs in the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and assemblies for whole genome shotgun sequencing projects in Genbank – faster and more efficiently!”

Penn State University: Penn State team to triple size of forensic database of mitochondrial DNA

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Penn State University: Penn State team to triple size of forensic database of mitochondrial DNA. “In circumstances where potential crime scene evidence such as hair or bone might be old or degraded, forensic scientists rely on DNA from a cell’s mitochondria — an organelle that has its own genome separate from the ‘human genome’ in the cell’s nucleus. Now, the National Institute of Justice has awarded a team of researchers from Penn State $770,000 to sequence the mitochondrial genomes of 10,000 Pennsylvanians. This will more than triple the size of the existing database and provide a crucial point of reference for use in human identification cases.”

AI Weirdness: AI vs a giraffe with no spots

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AI Weirdness: AI vs a giraffe with no spots. “Image recognition algorithms are trained on a variety of images from around the internet, and/or on a few standard image datasets. But there likely haven’t been any spotless giraffes in their training data, since the last one to be born was probably in 1972 in Tokyo. How do they do when faced with photos of the spotless giraffe?”

Global Coffee Report: WCR releases Arabica genetic fingerprint database

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Global Coffee Report: WCR releases Arabica genetic fingerprint database. “Verification of coffee varieties ensures quality control of plant material is available to farmers worldwide. WCR is making the database openly accessible to the scientific community so that it can be used by public and private labs for variety verification.”

Harvard Gazette: The eye as we’ve never seen it

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Harvard Gazette: The eye as we’ve never seen it. “In a culmination of more than a decade of research, Harvard scientists have completed a detailed analysis that could not only light the way to better, more targeted gene therapies for blindness, but also inspire a new appreciation for the vast complexity of human vision. The team, led by neurobiologist Joshua Sanes, has authored a complete catalog of the nearly 160 cell types found across all the structures of the human eye, as well as an inventory of the genes each cell type expresses.”