Archive for the ‘Genetics’ Category
Monday, July 14th, 2008
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a two-year grant of $220,076 to Williams College Assistant Professor of Biology Lara D. Hutson, in support of her research on Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease or CMT.CMT is the most common inherited neuromuscular disease, affecting as many as one in every 2,500 individuals. CMT ...
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Monday, July 14th, 2008
Human cancer cells divide and conquer. Unless physicians can control that division with surgery, chemotherapy or radiation, the wildly dividing cells will eventually destroy a person's life.Researchers have known for some time that an enzyme called telomerase is crucial to cancer's progress. Now, for the first time, researchers at the ...
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Sunday, July 13th, 2008
Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have solved a mystery that lies at the heart of human learning, and they say the solution may help explain some forms of mental retardation as well as provide clues to overall brain functioning.Researchers have long puzzled over why a gene known as brain-derived ...
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
An international team of scientists studying genetic causes of autism spectrum disorders by focusing on families where both parents shared a recent ancestor, found that seemingly diverse genes linked to autism had something in common in that many were triggered by by brain development that is regulated by early childhood ...
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
As they design new drugs to fight off influenza, scientists may not need to attack the virus directly. Instead, they may be able to stave off infection by targeting one of more than 100 proteins inside host cells on which the virus depends.These potential drug targets are the result of ...
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
Diabetes in men has a direct effect on fertility, a scientist told the 24th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. Dr. Con Mallidis from Queen's University, Belfast, UK, said that, despite the prevailing view that it had little effect on male reproductive function, the Belfast ...
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
Scientists funded by the Wellcome Trust have identified a key mechanism that enables malaria-infected red blood cells to stick to the walls of blood vessels and avoid being destroyed by the body's immune system. The research, published in the journal Cell, highlights an important potential new target for anti-malarial drugs.Malaria ...
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered a type of gene regulation never before observed in mammals--a "ribozyme" that controls the activity of an important family of genes in several different species.The findings, published in the journal Nature, describe a new and surprising role for the so-called ...
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
Agroup of common genetics variants that affect the nicotine receptors inthe nervous system could significantly increase the risk of developingnicotine addiction. These results, which could have powerfulimplications for policy preventing tobacco use in young people, werepublished on July 11, 2008 in the open-access journal PLoSGenetics. Singlenucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are variations ...
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
Recently identified genetic markers, called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), that are associated with a small but statistically significant increase in the risk of breast cancer do not appear to substantially improve the accuracy of existing models that use clinical factors to predict an individual's risk, according to a study in ...
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
Biotech and pharmaceutical firms are developing a host of new technologies designed to streamline the complicated drug discovery process, reports Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News (GEN). Most successful approaches rely on a combination of high-throughput screening methods, miniaturization techniques, and advanced data-analysis tools, according to an article in the July ...
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
Tuberculosis may call to mind Old West consumptives and early 20th-century sanatoriums, yet according to the World Health Organization, the disease took the lives of more than 1.5 million people worldwide in 2007. In the United States alone, thousands of new cases are reported annually making TB an enduring menace. ...
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
The Royal Microscopical Society (RMS) released official attendance figures confirming that MICROSCIENCE 2008 at London's ExCeL, 23-26 June, was the largest to date in terms of exhibition and conference size, as well as daily visitor numbers. With 2170 visitors over the full three days of the event, this represents a ...
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
In a collaborative project scientists from the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin (MPI MolGen), Germany and Genomatix with a business in Munich, Germany and Ann Arbor, MI, USA, applied next generation sequencing and analysis methods to generate an unprecedented view at the human transcriptome.Deep sequencing of transcripts from two ...
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), where a single sperm is injected into an egg to fertilise it, is increasingly used to help infertile men father children. Although the sperm chosen for the procedure may appear quite normal, researchers in the US have found that many of them in fact have DNA ...
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