Species Diversity Helps Researchers Refine Analyses

ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2009)�� In the new era of personalized medicine, physicians hope to provide earlier diagnoses and improve therapy by evaluating patients’ genetic blueprints. But, as a new bioinformatics study emphasizes, the first step must be to correctly decipher the deluge of information locked in our DNA and determine its impact on human health.

In the September issue of Genome Research, Dr. Sudhir Kumar led a team of researchers at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University in examining DNA mutations from both healthy and diseased patients. Their work evaluates the reliability of computer models aimed at predicting the eventual effect of such mutations.

Along with Kumar, director of the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Evolutionary Functional Genomics, others involved with the study were co-authors Michael P. Suleski, Glenn J. Markov, Simon Lawrence, Antonio Marco and Alan J. Filipski.