Posts for 'Gossips' Category

Tests are offered in private clinics and over the internet with the aim of predicting the risk of disease later in life. However, there have been warnings of firms making bogus claims about their tests, with several having little basis in science. There are also concerns that parents who pay for a test for their offspring could be breaching their child's rights.

Now the Human Genetics Commission (HGC) has published a set of voluntary principles for the industry relating to all aspects, including marketing. The principles stop short of forming an official code of practice, which the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee called for last year.

Its report said the industry must be much more tightly regulated and tests needed to be thoroughly reviewed before being marketed. Firms will be under no obligation to sign up to the new principles and there will be no official "mark" for consumers to look for.

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Epigenetic changes to DNA in breast cancers are directly linked with diet, alcohol, and tumour size, and could hence give a glimpse of the severity of the disease, according to researchers from Brown University and the University of California San Francisco.

The findings point to the emergence of new biomarkers that researchers hope will give a more detailed view of the environmental factors that contribute to tumour development and could, in the future, provide improvements in diagnostics and treatment decisions, as well as potentially more personalized recommendations to help prevent recurrence.

The use of epigenetic profiles as biomarkers of disease subtype and severity is a rapidly emerging field with other notable contributions from this group- a field that is being advanced with the support of the NIH, and shows promise for developing novel clinical tools.

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Ten years ago, researchers created the first devices (here and here) widely viewed as launching the field of synthetic biology. In the decade since, advances in genomics and the chemical synthesis of DNA, among other fields, have created new tools for investigating and understanding the behavior of biological systems. Some researchers now believe that the time is right to harness these tools in new efforts against cancer and other diseases.

To explore how these tools might be used, NCI and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences convened a workshop in April called “Synthetic Biology and Biomedicine: Progress, Outlook, and Challenges.” The meeting brought leaders in the field to Bethesda, MD, to discuss everything from state-of-the-art technologies and their potential applications in cancer research to ethical questions raised by new discoveries. (See the sidebar below.)

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Here at Singularity Hub, any study that shows the genetic origins of extreme longevity – especially one showing huge effects and published  in a journal as prestigious as Science – is basically our bread and butter. The centenarian study we covered last week made lots of headlines.

And for good reason: it claimed that by looking at a random genome in the study, they could predict with 77% accuracy whether or not that subject lived past 100. But these amazing results have raised a few eyebrows among experts, and some significant problems have already been identified with its methods. Here’s a quick rundown of alleged flaws, as well as the authors’ rebuttals.

First off, for many in the genetics community, the effects of single variants on longevity seemed too strong. Jeffrey Barrett of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has pointed out in the Guardian that in most genetics studies, a single genetic variant will only sway the chances of showing a phenotype by 1.5 fold, at best. The longevity study found a number of variants with far stronger effects, increasing an individual’s chance of hitting the century mark by as much as 10 fold. Barrett suggested that independent replication of the study would likely find far weaker effects.

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A study  published in the prestigious journal Science earlier this month suggesting that genes may hold a key for living to be 100 or older has since come under criticism from experts in the field of genetics. The study, led by Paola Sebastiani and Dr. Thomas Perls at the Boston University School of Public Health and School of Medicine, respectively, used genetic analysis to identify 150 gene variants that researchers used to predict whether people would live to be centenarians with 77% accuracy.

The findings were widely reported — by TIME, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere — as yielding clues to the secrets of long life, and potentially paving the way for genetic tests for longevity. Yet, skepticism from colleagues in the field of genetics has since given way to more vocal criticism of the study, the editorial process that led to its publication, and the media environment that put it in the headlines.

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The scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, who 'fathered' the Digital Embryo have now given it wings, creating the Fly Digital Embryo. In work published today in Nature Methods, they were able to capture fruit fly development on film, and were the first to clearly record how a zebrafish's eyes and midbrain are formed.

The improved technique will also help to shed light on processes and organisms, which have so far been under-studied because they could not be followed under a microscope. "Non-transparent samples like the fruit fly embryo scatter light, so the microscope picks up a mixture of in-focus and out-of-focus signal– good and bad information, if you like," says Ernst Stelzer, whose group carried out the project at EMBL.

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They exhibit remarkable properties. They never complain. And you can kill off the ones you don't like at the end of the day. Those are just three of the reasons why genetically modified microorganisms could become some of.

The most valuable employees in the green revolution. Siluria, a startup that spun out of another startup called Cambrios Technologies, has proposed a way to convert natural gas into chemicals like ethylene with biologically inspired catalysts.

The catalysts, ideally, will reduce the time, energy and cost involved in producing chemicals. Siluria differs from mainstream chemistry companies in that it derives its catalysts from nature.

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Bringing the known number to a grand total of 38 is yet another dozen new genes that scientists have identified and linked to the most common form of diabetes. Researchers at Edinburgh University hope to search for better ways of preventing and treating the Type 2 diabetes, which alters levels of insulin, the body's sugar-regulating hormone.

The genes are involved in the function of insulin-producing pancreatic cells, the control of insulin's action in the body, and the regulation of cell growth. "One important theme is that several of the genes seem to be important in controlling the number of pancreatic beta-cells that an individual has," Nature quoted Professor Mark McCarthy, of Oxford University, as saying.

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Rare variations in a single gene can lead to a wide variety of autoimmune disorders, including diabetes, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, a new study shows. The gene in question encodes an enzyme called sialic acid acetylesterase or SIAE, which regulates the activity of the immune system’s antibody-producing B cells. About 2 percent to 3 percent of people with autoimmune disorders have defects in the enzyme that allow B cells to run amok and make antibodies that attack the body, a team led by Shiv Pillai of Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown and Harvard Medical School reports online June 16 in Nature.

“It’s a seminal paper because it is so applicable to a wide variety of autoimmune diseases, says Judy Cho, a Yale geneticist not associated with the study. The finding suggests that enhancing the enzyme’s activity could help treat disease in people with autoimmune disorders.

Previously, Pillai’s group showed that mice lacking SIAE develop a lupuslike disease in which high levels of antibodies attack the body’s own proteins. The researchers decided to examine the enzyme in people who, like the mice, make high levels of autoimmune antibodies. “One hundred percent, I was confident that we would find nothing,” Pillai says.

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Just how old is the scourge of the tropics, malaria? There's been intense debate among scientists, with some saying it evolved when humans began raising crops, 10,000 years ago, Others suggested it began assailing our ancestors even before they were anatomically modern humans, 300,000 years. But now scientists have shown that this sometimes deadly tropical disease evolved together with modern humans and moved with them as they migrated out of Africa between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago.

The research, published in the journal Current Biology, sequenced the largest collection of malaria parasites ever assembled. The international team, led by researchers at Imperial College London, were able to compare differences in those sequences which allowed them to recreate the progress of the malaria parasite across the tropics and to calculate its age.

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