Human Genetics Using GP

The Columns ICES-2008 new books calls & calendar EDITORIAL Editorial H appy new year and welcome to the new issue of SIGEVOlution. You are probably mumbling ". .. the Summer issue arrives during Winter. .. again? " Indeed, this is almost becoming a tradition. As it happened last year, we had some minor issues which delayed the editing process. In the meanwhile however, we have been working on a little surprise for you that is already sitting in my mailbox just waiting to reach you in the near future, so stay tuned for more. Third volume, second issue, with a rich menu to choose from. Bioinformatics has become a major research area which poses many challenges and, most important, provides many research opportunities. If you want to know more, the first paper by Casey Greene and Jason Moore is a very good point to start from. Pherographia is instead a brand new drawing procedure inspired by artificial ants that has strong connections to the camera obscura used in the early days of photography. Carlos M. Fernandes tells you more about it in the second paper. While if you wish to have fun with Grammatical Evolution, then GEVA, the tool presented in the third paper is probably the best choice. At the end, we have the columns providing information about the latest edition of the International Conference on Evolvable Systems (ICES-2008), the new books, and the forthcoming events. As always, this issue would not be here without the many people who helped me cooking it, Casey S. Last but not least, I wish to thank Franz Rothlauf for the deadline extension, what a relief.. . Just kidding! The cover is a photo of Montréal by Frank Slack, the original image is available here. The development of rapid data-collection technologies is changing the biomedical and biological sciences. In human genetics chip-based methods facilitate the measurement of thousands of DNA sequence variations from across the human genome. The collection of genetic data is no longer a major rate limiting step. Instead the new challenges are the analysis and interpretation of these high dimensional and frequently noisy datasets. The specific challenge we are interested in is the identification of combinations of interacting DNA sequence variations predictive of common human diseases. Specifically, we wish to detect epistasis or gene-gene interactions. Here we focus solely on the situation where there is an epistatic effect but no …