Genetic 'Rosetta Stone' unveiled in Nature Scientists have
developed a new community resource that may act as a Rosetta
Stone for revealing the genetic basis of traits and disease. A
new paper in Nature describes the Drosophila Genetic Reference
Panel, or DGRP, which provides the highest-resolution view to
date of the genome structure and variation in a population of
192 fruit flies with diverse traits. The study was led by Trudy
Mackay of North Carolina State University, in collaboration with
the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine
and David Mittelman of Virginia Tech's Virginia Bioinformatics
Institute, as well as a large group of researchers around the
world. "One of the grand challenges of biology is to understand
how genetic variants and environmental factors interact to
produce variation in complex phenotypes such as height,
behaviors, and disease susceptibility within populations. This
effort has been stymied by the lack of knowledge of all genetic
variants in a population of a