It’s personal

Jeffrey Barrett | Audio | Genomic Expressions

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Jeffrey Barrett | Director of Open Targets

One of the wonderful things about being a genome scientist is the personal connection to your own research. My work involves finding genetic variants involved with diseases, and every one of those discoveries tells me something about myself, too. “It’s personal” shows my own genotype at 163 genetic variants associated with inflammatory bowel disease that we discovered. The size of each circle represents how big an effect on disease risk that variant has, and the colour represents whether I am homozygous low risk (green), heterozygous (yellow) or homozygous high risk (red) at that position. To me, genomics means learning about humankind as a whole, and about people one at a time.