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Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Gene-targeted Random Mutagenesis to Select Heterochromatin-destabilizing Proteasome Mutants in Fission Yeast
Published on: May 15, 2018
Mendelian Randomization
1Deputy Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Cambridge CB10 1SD, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
Mendelian randomization borrows statistical techniques from economics to allow researchers to analyze the effects of the environment, drug treatments, and other factors on human biology and disease. Taking advantage of the fact that genetic variation is randomized among children from the same parents, it allows genetic variants known to influence factors like alcohol consumption or low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels to be used as instrumental variables that can disentangle the effects of these factors on outcomes such as pregnancy or cardiovascular disease, respectively. There are caveats to analyses using Mendelian randomization and related techniques that researchers should be aware of, but they are increasingly powerful tools for solving problems in epidemiology and human biology.
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