Interviewee: Mark Skolnick. Mark Skolnick talks about taking advantage of the well-documented genealogy of the Mormon pioneers to study inherited genetic disorders. (DNAi Location: Applications > Genes and medicine > Gene hunting > Mark Skolnick > Utah's resource)

So this is a completely unique resource for finding genes, so we're using it to find the breast cancer genes and other cancer genes, skin cancer melanoma, prostate cancer genes and other clusters that we've studied. It's particularly unusual because the Mormon pioneers were polygamous, they would have often five or ten wives, dozens of children, hundreds of grandchildren, and thousands of great-grandchildren. And this allows us to trace genes through these very large descent groups and look at patterns of specific DNA variations on specific chromosomes that tell us where those genes must be, and then go in to that region where the genes are, study the candidate genes and actually isolate the offending gene. That's what we're trying to do.

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