DNA from Mom and Dad: New Method Personalizes Medicine

Is your DNA from mom or from dad? Particular genetic sequences can come from different sides of the family tree. Now, scientists have developed a new technique that successfully determines whether these genetic sequences come from an individual's mother or father. The findings promise to accelerate studies on how genes contribute to disease.

Except for sex chromosomes, everyone has two copies of each chromosome. One copy comes from the mother and the other copy comes from the father. Current techniques, though, cannot distinguish between the two copies of each gene. This means that the methods aren't very good at determining whether particular genetic differences, such as a single-letter change in the DNA, originate with an individual's mother or father. This can muddy genetic analysis.

In order to get past this particular issue, the scientists developed a new technique. A mixture of molecular biology and computational biology, the method, called HaploSeq, can enable clinicians to better assess a person's individual risk for disease. For example, people at risk for cancer often have more than one DNA mutation. The technique could enable researchers to determine of the two mutations are on the same chromosome or are on different chromosomes, which can help with risk assessment.

"This advance has direct implications for the utility of genomics in clinical practice and will also have profound effects on genetic research and discovery," said Siddarth Selvaraj, one of the researchers, in a news release.

This research won't just have implications for medicine, though. It also has the potential to analyze migration and determine ancestry from their DNA sequences. This could allow researchers to better understand past events and bolster an ongoing international project to assess worldwide human genetic variation.

The findings are important for future research and studies. More specifically, they have enormous implications for personalized medicine.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.