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CellBioGuy comments on New article on in vitro iterated embryo selection - Less Wrong
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Comments (33)
How would this be useful for reproductive purposes over and above embryo selection? You can see almost no actual phenotypes in an embryo other than "growing right" versus "going horribly wrong".
You can sequence for genotypes, and do selection based on the results of genomic studies.
I read this and all I can think of is the recent family 23andme results with half-opposite results of what they 'should' be for risk factors given known family history back three generations indicating that whatever is causing the risk is completely unknown to genetic science, and a recent study in which only 15% of the genetic basis for height (known to be >80% responsible) was discovered spread over more than 400 loci... don't get me wrong there's hardly any reason anybody should be conceived with simple common mendelian diseases these days, but if you wanted to actually change much other than that or gross differences in brain or liver chemistry you need to actually observe phenotype.
Note that the proportion explained has been scaling very nicely with increasing sample size, (going from ~0 to current levels over about an order of magnitude scaling in sample size, and with several orders of magnitude left to go), and that the efficacy of a single generation of embryo selection goes with the standard deviation, not the variance, so one should take the square root of "heritability explained" numbers to estimate efficacy.
Also see recent genetic results such as this indicating that common variants are adequate, given larger sample sizes.
This is discussed in the section 'Three Applications'.