A review in the December issue of the journal Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine by Paul Bunn Jr, MD, University of Colorado Cancer Center investigator and past president of ASCO, IASLC and AACI describes the current state of lung cancer care. "We're in a new paradigm in which we...
A study dating the age of more than 1 million single-letter variations in the human DNA code reveals that most of these mutations are of recent origin, evolutionarily speaking. These kinds of mutations change one nucleotide - an A, C, T or G - in the DNA sequence. Over 86 percent of the harmful...
A large-scale international study involving French researchers from the Inserm-Institut Pasteur Lille-Universite Lille Nord de France "Public health and molecular epidemiology of ageing-related diseases" joint research unit led by Philippe Amouyel, has just discovered a gene for susceptibility...
An international team of geneticists, pediatricians, surgeons and epidemiologists from 23 institutions across three continents has identified two areas of the human genome associated with the most common form of non-syndromic craniosynostosis - premature closure of the bony plates of the skull...
The zebrafish is a potential tool for testing one class of unique individual genetic differences found in humans, and may yield information helpful for the emerging field of personalized medicine, according to a team led by Penn State College of Medicine scientists. The differences, or...
The genes responsible for inherited diseases are clearly bad for us, so why hasn't evolution, over time, weeded them out and eliminated them from the human genome altogether? Part of the reason seems to be that genes that can harm us at one stage of our lives are necessary and beneficial to us...
Although placebos have played a critical role in medicine and clinical research for more than 70 years, it has been a mystery why these inactive treatments help to alleviate symptoms in some patients - and not others. Now researchers have for the first time identified genetic differences between...
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have identified tissue mechanisms that may influence a woman's susceptibility or resistance to breast cancer after exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation, such as the levels used in full-body CT...
When ancestral humans walked out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies came along with them. Now the fruit flies, widely used for genetics research, are returning to Africa and establishing new populations alongside flies that never left - offering new...
In a new genetic study, researchers said they may have found a way to cut the cost of genetic screening for breast and ovarian cancers from $3000 to $400. Three teams of infertility scientists in New York and Austria collaborated to study gene mutations that increase a woman's likelihood of...
A new study published online in Nature Medicine, led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, describes the discovery of a novel drug combination aimed at a subset of melanoma patients who currently have no effective therapeutic options. Melanoma patients have...
DNA consists of regions called exons, which code for the synthesis of proteins, interspersed with noncoding regions called introns. Being able to predict the different regions in a new and unannotated genome is one of the biggest challenges facing biologists today. Now researchers at the Indian...
Vitamin B12 is essential to human health. However, some people have inherited conditions that leave them unable to process vitamin B12. As a result they are prone to serious health problems, including developmental delay, psychosis, stroke and dementia. An international research team recently...
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have identified a new genetic target for diuretic therapy in patients with fluid overload - like those with congestive heart failure, liver cirrhosis or kidney failure. These results, presented in the July 30 advance online edition of the journal...
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have discovered that some cases of glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive form of primary brain cancer, are caused by the fusion of two adjacent genes. The study also found that drugs that target the protein produced by this genetic...
Human diversity in Africa is greater than any place else on Earth. Differing food sources, geographies, diseases and climates offered many targets for natural selection to exert powerful forces on Africans to change and adapt to their local environments. The individuals who adapted best were the...
The entire genomes of 91 human sperm from one man have been sequenced by Stanford University researchers. The results provide a fascinating glimpse into naturally occurring genetic variation in one individual, and are the first to report the whole-genome sequence of a human gamete - the only...
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute have genetically modified a bacterium commonly found in the mosquito's midgut and found that the parasite that causes malaria in people does not survive in mosquitoes carrying the modified bacterium. The bacterium, Pantoea agglomerans...
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers have developed a powerful visual analytical approach to explore genetic data, enabling scientists to identify novel patterns of information that could be crucial to human health. The method, which combines three different "bipartite...
Mosquitoes bred to be unable to infect people with the malaria parasite are an attractive approach to helping curb one of the world's most pressing public health issues, according to UC Irvine scientists. Anthony James and colleagues from UCI and the Pasteur Institute in Paris have produced a...