In many situations, heart muscle cells do not respond to external stresses in the same ways that skeletal muscle cells do. But under some conditions, heart and skeletal muscles can both waste away at fatally rapid rates, according to a new study led by experts at Cincinnati Children's. The new […]
The prevalence of genetic mutations associated with breast cancer in Black and white women is the same, according to a new JAMA Oncology study of nearly 30,000 patients led by researchers in the Basser Center for BRCA at the Abramson Cancer Center. About five percent of both Black and white […]
A new study from UCLA and Stanford University researchers finds that three-dimensional human stem cell-derived 'mini brain' organoids can mature in a manner that is strikingly similar to human brain development. For the new study, published in Nature Neuroscience February 22, senior authors Dr. Daniel Geschwind of UCLA and Dr. […]
When can tuberculosis therapy be stopped without risk of relapse? Doctors are faced with this question time and again, because the lack of detection of the tuberculosis pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis is no guarantee for a permanent cure of the lung infection. Patients who respond to the standard therapy may be […]
Serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) uses mRNA from a sample to create complementary DNA (cDNA) fragments for amplification and sequencing using high-throughput sequencing technology. Credit: Andre Nantel/Shutterstock.com SAGE is based on tags which can identify the original transcript, and rapid sequencing of tags linked together. The procedure essentially simplifies […]
In phage-display, a gene encoding the surface protein of a bacteriophage is replaced with a gene encoding a novel protein. The technique can be used in drug discovery and research for the investigation of novel polypeptides. Image Credit: Axel_Kock / Shutterstock.com The discovery of phage display was spurred on by […]
Cells don't express all the genes they contain all the time. The portion of our genome that encodes eye color, for example, doesn't need to be turned on in liver cells. In plants, genes encoding the structure of a flower can be turned off in cells that will form a […]
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia worldwide (60-70% of all dementia cases) and is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Though around 10-15% of cases are genetic, the vast majority of cases are sporadic and attributed to many risk factors. There is, at present, no cure or disease-modifying […]
Researchers at the Estonian Genome Center at the University of Tartu have described hitherto undiscovered associations between miscarriage and maternal genes. They have published their findings in Nature Communications. Miscarriage is the most common complication of pregnancy, affecting about 15% of clinically confirmed pregnancies. Although, the risk of miscarriage increases […]
A new study, led by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, has deepened the understanding of epigenetic mechanisms in tumorigenesis and revealed a previously undetected repertoire of cancer driver genes. The study was published this week in Science Advances. Using a new prediction algorithm, called DORGE (Discovery of Oncogenes […]