Emil O W Kirkegaard

Not too surprising. Look at all the minimal genome work in yeast and bacteria: there are a lot of different minimal subsets all of which still yield a living organism, since different combinations can cover for various absences.

Yes but usually these delete noncoding regions.

Fwiw the study doesn't seem to show you can just delete those regions as an intervention with no consequence, no?

No, CNVs can be harmful, but by collecting from 'healthy' individuals (scare quotes because we're all sick and unhealthy compared to what we could be), it does imply that many CNVs do little. Consistent with the modest CNV GWASes for traits so far too as well.

1/Thanks! I likely fail to comprehend something basic. My point was that, since they collected from "healthy" people of different pops., the functionality of the missing/useless CNV might be realized elsewhere for people in that pop - i.e., it's not the same as an intervention to

Well, there's only so many genes. If you can find deletions in healthy living people for X% of known genes, then at worst, assuming all other deletions are fatal, only 100-X% of genes are inherently necessary. Looking for the dog that didn't bark like ExAC.

In order to really know this you'd have to test over a wide range of environments.

And pathogens

Systems biology shows you should expect a lot of backup mechanims to keep complex functions on. One of the reasons the evopsych "complex adaptations must be species universals" argument fails. Room for fine tuning changing just one bio pathway while others keep old function going