Heart Disease Research

The first paper on my postdoctoral research came out this week - "Novel Associations of Nonstructural Loci with Paraoxonase Activity."  It's my only article thus far focused exclusively on biomedical work after years of anthropological genetics and evolutionary work.  It appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Lipids that focuses on paraoxonases, an enzyme related to heart disease.  The Journal of Lipids is an open-access journal so you can read my article for free here.  Briefly, I did a study to identify genetic markers associated with variation in that amount of enzyme produced by different individuals.  Paraoxonase is interesting to researchers and physicians because it appear to protect people from developing heart disease, but the mechanism in unknown.  The hope is that by identifying the genes that regulate paraoxonase, we can determine the pathway through which paraoxonase protects against heart disease.

New Paper on the Evolution of Skin Color

I was toodling around my Google Reader today over lunch when I spotted a link in the Scientific American blog feed about genes related to skin color.  Since that is something I study, I clicked through to Scientific American which led me to the EvoAnth blog.  I was reading along when I suddenly realized they were talking about MY PAPER which is already available online (here) and will come out in print sometime in the next few months. So since other blogs are talking about it, I thought I'd mention it here as well. :)

That's two papers down and one to go to meet my goal of three papers published by April! I did publish this commentary in November as well, but it wasn't on my research so I'm not going to count it towards my goal.  I'm so excited to have one of the papers based on my dissertation work published and I hope to have the other out soon as well.  If you want to keep an eye on my publication record (and I know you do), I set up a Google Citations site a while ago.

Okay, enough self-promotion for today.

First Publication of 2011!

It looks better in real life.

I haven't posted about work in a while (it's good, but I think about it all day, so I don't always want to write about it when I get home).  So I thought I should point you to my first publication of 2011.  This is actually the outgrowth of my master's paper (which I wrote three years ago) and so is a bit overdue.  The article, "Iris texture traits show associations with iris color and genomic ancestry" was published this month in the American Journal of Human Biology.  Thanks to the fun pictures of irises that we used in the study, we made it to the cover!