By analyzing data from thousands of patients, Princeton researchers have identified genetic mutations that frequently occur in people with uterine cancer, colorectal cancer or skin cancer — an important step toward using genome sequences to better understand cancer and guide new treatments. (more…)
University of Arizona researcher Michael Worobey and his team have discovered that the key to understanding influenza pandemics may lie in flu exposure during childhood.
Just as the world was recovering from the devastation of World War I, another killer swept across the globe. A deadly flu virus attacked more than one-third of the world’s population, and within months had killed more than 50 million people – three times as many as the war – and had done it more quickly than any other illness in recorded history. (more…)
Collaboration Led by Berkeley Lab Researchers Creates High-Resolution Map of Gene Regulatory Elements in the Brain
Future research into the underlying causes of neurological disorders such as autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia, should greatly benefit from a first-of-its-kind atlas of gene-enhancers in the cerebrum (telencephalon). This new atlas, developed by a team led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is a publicly accessible Web-based collection of data that identifies and locates thousands of gene-regulating elements in a region of the brain that is of critical importance for cognition, motor functions and emotion.
“Understanding how the brain develops and functions, and how it malfunctions in neurological disorders, remains one of the most daunting challenges in contemporary science,” says Axel Visel, a geneticist with Berkeley Lab’s Genomics Division. “We’ve created a genome-wide digital atlas of gene enhancers in the human brain – the switches that tell genes when and where they need to be switched on or off. This enhancer atlas will enable other scientists to study in more detail how individual genes are regulated during development of the brain, and how genetic mutations may impact human neurological disorders.” (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers who have been working for nearly a decade to piece together the process by which an enzyme repairs sun-damaged DNA have finally witnessed the entire process in full detail in the laboratory.
What they saw contradicts fundamental notions of how key biological molecules break up during the repair of sunburn – and that knowledge could someday lead to drugs or even lotions that could heal sunburn in humans. (more…)
*Study recognized for significance and importance in the world’s most common genetic disease*
COLUMBIA, Mo. – A University of Missouri researcher believes his latest work moves scientists closer to a cure for 
cystic fibrosis, one of the world’s most common fatal genetic diseases. (more…)
