SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 7 - 9 may 2008

New Fellows Seminar

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Professor Nicholas Martin
Senior Principal Research Scientist, Queensland Institute of Medical Research

Nicholas Martin graduated from the University of Adelaide and obtained his PhD in genetics at the University of Birmingham. He returned to the Australian National University where he played a major role in founding the Australian Twin Registry which he has used in a series of very large twin studies of personality, intelligence, alcoholism, asthma and endometriosis that have made important findings and set international standards for power and rigour. After three years in the USA he returned to the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. His current interest is in linkage and association methods to locate genes of major effect on complex traits including melanoma, depression and alcoholism. He has attracted major funding from numerous sources and heads a research group of over 70 people.

Finding genes for common diseases: The GWAS revolution

The genomics revolution offers the opportunity to isolate genes contributing to risk of diseases known to run in families but with no simple mode of inheritance. This has been made possible by collection of disease information on very large samples of families, the availability of large numbers of genetic markers which can be typed semi-automatically, and improved statistical and computing tools for analysis. This search has recently been dramatically accelerated by development of microarrays for typing up to one million single base changes in DNA simultaneously which allow genome-wide association scans (GWAS). Methods used in searches for genes influencing melanoma, depression, alcoholism and other complex diseases will be shown.