STANFORD, Calif. — Previously hidden obesity-related genes have been uncovered from old experiments by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. The finding suggests that useful information about many medical disorders may be languishing in mountains of discarded data.“We’ve devised a fairly simple way to convert large amounts of existing raw data into candidate disease genes for further genetic study,” said Atul Butte, MD, PhD, a pediatrician at Packard Children’s and director of the hospital’s Center for Pediatric Bioinformatics. “When we put the information together, we were not only able to pinpoint those that have already been identified, but we also came up with some very interesting new predictions.”
