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PROVO — An accidental discovery could help a lot of people.
Paul Bodily, a PhD student at Brigham Young University, was working on developing an improved method for DNA assembly when he instead landed on a way to identify markers linked to genetic diseases. A study detailing the findings was published in the journal Bioinformatics.
"It required a lot of persistence and the outcome wasn't what I had originally planned to investigate," Bodily said in a statement. "I just continued down a path, not knowing where it was going to lead, until I found something shiny."
Through a new algorithm, Bodily's team at BYU can detect inversions in DNA while assembling sequences. Those inversions have been connected to conditions that include autism, mental retardation, diabetes, epilepsy and schizophrenia, according to BYU.
The team is sharing the algorithm with other researchers for free, hoping it can assist others in their work. BYU's algorithm is much more effective at identifying elusive inversions than other methods, according to the university.
"There are diseases, like autism, that we're really uncertain as to what causes them," senior author Mark Clement said in a statement. "To at least have improved tools for detecting a possible cause is important."
