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A Primer of Human Genetics is an introductory textbook designed to give students the foundation they need to understand and appreciate the extraordinary shifts in human genetics that have accompanied the arrival of genomics. A Primer of Human Genetics lays out the key concepts of human evolution, quantitative genetics, and personalized medicine before describing the tools that are missing from most contemporary textbooks: genome-wide association studies, whole-genome resequencing, gene expression and epigenome profiling, and integrative genomics. The final section provides an up-to-date survey of specific findings in six major domains of human disease: immunological, metabolic, cardiovascular, cancer, neuropsychological, and aging disorders.
After reading A Primer of Human Genetics, not only will students be better equipped to read current literature, they will gain a sense of the impact that the revolution in genomics has had for our understanding of the human condition, as well as of the major trends in human genetics research. Students are assumed to have a core understanding of genetics such as would be obtained in a general genetics class.
Each chapter is approximately 20 pages long, and organized under up to ten sub-headings, most of which incorporate an illustrative figure. Chapter summary points recap the key messages, and references point students to key reviews and contemporary highlights. Several of the chapters contain a single box, which provides extra material on topics such as "Consent and Responsible Conduct of Research" and "Methylation Analysis in Biology".
Greg Gibson is Professor and Director of the Center for Integrative Genomics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and holds an adjunct appointment at Emory University School of Medicine. He earned a Bachelor's Degree in Biology at the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in Cell Biology at the University of Basel (with Walter J. Gehring). He worked for 15 years with the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster, mostly while at North Carolina State University, during which time he wrote A Primer of Genome Science with Spencer Muse. Dr. Gibson serves on the editorial boards of several leading journals, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is in quantitative genetics and genomics, focusing on environmental and genetic sources of human variability, the regulation of gene expression in immunogenomics, and predictive health.
