Population Genetics

original full text at Nature

EUGENE RUSSO

Population geneticists are in short supply, as the need to translate large data sets into disease-susceptibility traits grows, says Eugene Russo

...A select subset of that few, population geneticists (or, as they are sometimes now more accurately called, molecular population geneticists) — researchers with not only genetics, but also mathematics and statistical know-how — are in increasingly high demand. Their role is becoming more important as large disease-susceptibility gene projects such as the haplotype-map project (see below) are being proposed.

"There are way more jobs than people to fill them," says Michael Boehnke, professor of biostatistics and director of the Center for Statistical Genetics at the University of Michigan. Jobs for population and statistical geneticists are so common, says Boehnke, that qualified PhD students routinely skip postdoctoral study to accept immediate faculty appointments. Meanwhile, molecular biologists often struggle to find appointments after doing several postdocs.

Boehnke — who himself started as a mathematician before parlaying his skills into a 'biomathematics' programme at the University of California, Los Angeles — is the sole recipient of the only National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) training grant that specifically emphasizes population genetics. The programme currently funds ten pre- and postdoctoral students. Boehnke, whose own centre has had problems finding permanent staff in these fields, recalls how he recently advertised the impending availability of two of his students to 15 colleagues at companies and universities across the country. Within two days, he received eight e-mails expressing interest.

The Human Genome Project and projects born of it continue to churn out vast amounts of sequence data. That data flood has also produced disease-susceptibility projects such as the search for genetic markers in its wake. The largest effort so far has been the search for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) — variations in only one base pair.