Nerding out

This post is mainly for the bioinformatics-inclined among my readership. For you others, rest assured I'll be back to my usual folderol and drivel by the next post.

Last night I was having coffee with CS, ostensibly so that we could both work on our theses. But no sooner do we get to talking about our short vacations out of town than we get to looking at CS' pictures and the considerably fewer pictures that I took (which are all on the blog, by the way).

CS observes, "You look a lot like your mom."

This is news to me, and I don't think about it again until I'm brushing my teeth this morning. And as I'm looking in the mirror, I'm thinking things like: Are my eyes more like my mom's or my dad's? My nose, my ears? How about this nearsightedness?

Then I get to thinking about bioinformatics (my graduate program, to you uninitiated) and I start wondering whether we (meaning all of us, humanity) will someday be able to say exactly what percentage we're of our mothers and what percentage our fathers. Who knows, maybe Craig Venter's already done this done for himself. After all, the man had his own genome sequenced. Who's to say he didn't do it for his parents too?

But beyond figuring out whether each of us is more our mother's child or our father's, an even more exciting prospect to me seems to be this: Can we reconstruct the sequence of events that occurred during meiosis down to the sequence-level? (Apologies for using "sequence" twice in that sentence, but I'm guessing you know the difference.) You know, be able to say crossover happened here, or mutation happened here, or -- oh look -- a thymine dimer.

I'm not sure if there's a bigger scientific objective here than the "oh cool" factor, but who wouldn't want to know what gametes got picked out of mom and dad to make him or her? Alright, I'm done nerding out for today. Back to the regularly scheduled program.