Everyone knows there is a lot of crazy stuff on the internet, but did you know there is a lot of great writing about genes, genetics, and human diseases? And believe it or not, sometimes these pieces are written by people who know what they're talking about. If you're looking for what's new in human genetics, you've come to the right place.

Welcome to the 31st Gene Genie, a blog carnival dedicated to great blogging about human genes and how they impact our health. This Mother's Day edition includes an in-depth highlight of the growing industry of personalized genetics.

I haven't contributed a single thing to the platypus genome project, but since my desk sits one floor above where people and robots broke the platypus DNA into chunks, cloned those chunks into bacteria, sequenced the pieces of DNA, and used massive amounts of computing power to assemble the stretches of sequence into a complete genomic whole, I'm going consider myself somewhat of an authority on the subject and tell you what's wrong with other people's ideas about the platypus.

The genome sequence of the platypus was published Thursday in Nature, and from the press headlines, you could be excused for thinking that genomics has in fact confirmed that the platypus is a freak of nature: part bird, part reptile, and part mammal. The animal certainly looks like it - the platypus has the webbed feet and bill of a duck, and venomous spines and rubbery eggs that remind us of reptiles, but it has fur and feeds its young with milk, so it must be a mammal. The confusing press headlines might even lead you to believe that we sequenced the platypus genome just to figure out what this thing is, when the truth is, as we'll see below, that the genome sequence has essentially confirmed what evolutionary biologists have already deduced about the position of the platypus on the tree of life.

Is the platypus part bird, part reptile part mammal, an amalgam of very different groups of animals? Is it a primitive mammal that resembles the early ancestors of all mammals? Can we figure out just what this creature is by gazing at its genome?

Would you recognize a legislative push for Creationism if you saw one? After decades of failed legal strategies to overtly ban evolution or make equal time for Creationism in public schools, the latest tack used by the opponents of evolution is to have 'academic freedom' bills that encourage school teachers to include supposed evidence against evolution, or the presentation of 'both sides' of a controversial issue in science class. If you support the integrity of science education, you should oppose bills like this, both because they are redundant when it comes to good science (teachers already can teach both scientific sides of a legitimate scientific debate), and because the Creationist legislators pushing them are up to no good. But are we reaching a point where Creationism is defining itself out of existence? Are they creating a legal loophole too small for their anti-evolutionary propaganda to fit through?

When it comes to manipulating your body with drugs, you have no better friend than your G-protein coupled receptors. G-protein coupled receptors (ok, you can call them GPCRs) are proteins embedded within the membrane that makes up the outer border of our cells, and their exposed cell-surface position makes them great targets for drugs. If you've ever taken Claritin, Zantac, beta blockers like Lopressor, oxytocin, epinephrine, Zyprexa, antihistamines, some anti-HIV drugs, opioids, cannabis, or merely consumed a caffeinated beverage, then you've medicinally manipulated some of your GCPRs. Nearly 1,000 of our 24,000 genes encode GCPRs, which testifies to the major role this class of proteins plays in our physiology.

Given the importance of these receptors, it is not surprising that an interesting new study is describing a GPCR which may play a role in brain size, memory, and social interaction, and mutations in this GPCR could play an important role in schizophrenia.

We go back a long way with herpesviruses. Our evolutionary line has been living with these genomic parasites for more than 100 million years, and today herpesviruses infect nearly all humans, as well as all other mammals, birds and reptiles that scientists have checked. We aren't born with these viruses, but most of us acquire multiple infections of various types of herpesviruses during childhood.

Unlike our relationship with many other, more notorious viruses, we've learned to peacefully coexist with herpesviruses for the most part. They set up shop in our cells, they use our molecular machinery to replicate themselves, and they take advantage of the influx of energy we provide from our diet. Sometimes the relationship goes sour, with the unfortunate results ranging from chickenpox to mononucleosis, genital herpes, and Burkitt's lymphoma, but by and large, most humans, and mammals in general, are never seriously harmed by these house guests. But do we get anything out of this relationship? Remarkably, recent research suggests that this 100 million-year coexistence may have been good for us too, helping our immune system to ward off even more serious pathogens.

Let's suppose that, knowing nothing about cars, you wanted to learn how they worked. You happen to have a friend who is an auto mechanic, so you ask him to explain cars to you: How do they start? How does burning gasoline make the engine go? How does the force generated by the engine get transferred to the wheels? Imagine that in answer to your questions, your mechanic friend brings you to an auto parts shop and begins to take parts off the shelf, explaining to you what each one is. By the end of the little lesson, your friend had shown you every piece that goes in your car and explained its function. Do you now know how a car works?

Well, no. Even if you could recite what each part does, you probably still have a poor understanding of how the parts work together to make a vehicle go. Let's take a more extreme scenario: you are teaching a class full of aspiring automobile engineers, and you want to teach them how to design cars. Would you teach them by just going through all the car parts one by one? Maybe you could even bring it all together at the end of the class and show them some diagrams of the parts put together: the chassis, the electrical system, the drive train. But even with the diagrams, these would-be engineers still won't be able to show up for work at Mercedes and design the next state-of-the-art engine. Parts lists and diagrams aren't enough; as any engineer can tell you, you need to get quantitative, you need to understand math and physics, and you need to be able to build model engines on computers, models which you can then test in silico without actually trying to physically build every new idea for an engine.

In many ways, molecular biologists are like that class of auto engineers.