The American Society of Human Genetics’ annual meeting has now kicked off in San Francisco. The usual terrifyingly large conference center, dizzying collection of stalls and posters as far as the eye can see are all very much in evidence, as is the migrating herds of human geneticists wondering the landscape looking for food in the perpetually busy local restaurants.
The first session I attended was given the perplexing title of “Yes Virginia, Family Studies Really Are Useful for Complex Traits in the Next-Generation Sequencing Era”. The session was in honour of the 80th birthday of statistical geneticist Robert Elston, whose development of the Elston-Stewart algorithm in the 1970s kickstarted the field of parametric linkage. It covered the use of next-generation sequencing family studies in the discovery of the hypothesised rare risk variants that everyone hopes to find. This isn’t really a new topic, and I last wrote about it at ASHG 2010, but it had a very different feel to two years ago.