24 min
What's a GWAS? What can it teach me about bipolar disorder? Yeah, No Journal Club
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- Mental Health
In this episode, we discuss a difficult article that uses large sets of data to (try to) identify gene polymorphisms associated with bipolar disorder. The study authors, members of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, utilize a technique knowns as genome-wide association study (GWAS). Understanding the technique requires having a sense of what a gene is, which turns out to be more complicated than we were taught back in high school. If you've forgotten what a SNP is or what "linkage disequilibrium" means, don't worry--we talk about those, too. We end with leaning into the uncertainty.
In this episode, we discuss a difficult article that uses large sets of data to (try to) identify gene polymorphisms associated with bipolar disorder. The study authors, members of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, utilize a technique knowns as genome-wide association study (GWAS). Understanding the technique requires having a sense of what a gene is, which turns out to be more complicated than we were taught back in high school. If you've forgotten what a SNP is or what "linkage disequilibrium" means, don't worry--we talk about those, too. We end with leaning into the uncertainty.
24 min