Researchers have linked a hormone known to adjust levels of key brain chemicals to the quality of our hearing as we age. The more of the hormone that older people have in their bloodstream, the better their hearing is, and the less of the hormone, the
Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the Brain Sciences Center at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center have discovered a new way to assess how brain networks act together.
Nutrigenomics experts worldwide have aligned, and they are calling for teamwork. Josi Ordovas, PhD, director of the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at
Rising global temperatures over the past two decades may be responsible for a shortened season of a serious respiratory illness in the United Kingdom, according to an article in the March 1 issue of Cli
Misfolded and damaged proteins are common to all human neurodegenerative diseases. Clumps of these aggregated proteins destroy neurons within the brain and cause disease. But explanations for the mechanism that actually causes cell death have varied wi
Pulmonary emphysema is caused primarily by cigarette smoking, and the underlying cellular mechanisms are thought to involve smoke-induced activation of tissue degrading enzymes known as proteases. Elastases are proteases that specifically degra
Researchers could determine one week after a bone marrow transplant which patients were likely to develop a serious and deadly complication, making them candidates for preventive treatment before any symptoms occur. Researchers at the
A team from the Faculty of Medicine at Universiti Laval and the research centre at CHUQ (Centre hospitalier universitaire de Quibec) has discovered a natural defence mechanism that the body deploys to c
Various forms of human muscular dystrophy result from mutations in genes encoding proteins of the nuclear envelope. A new paper in the February 15th issue of G&D reveals how. Ten human hereditary laminopathies, including Emery-Dreifuss musc
Researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research are developing a method to determine in a matter of hours if someone has been exposed to a bioterrorism agent just by looking at the pattern of
In a study in the July 1 issue of the journal Cancer Research, the researchers used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array technology, which focuses on the building blocks of individual genes, to identify regions of chromosomes where genes were either left out or multiplied over and over - mistakes that are often associated with cancer. In this effort, SNP (pronounced "snip") arrays have been used to find gene-copy errors in lung cancer cells.
"In a previous study, we showed that SNP arrays offer a unique way of locating copy-number changes in cell chromosomes and of determining when genes on a pair of chromosomes are mismatched," says the study's senior author, Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber. "The current study demonstrates that high-resolution SNP technology is powerful enough to identify copy-number alterations that previously hadn't been found in lung cancer cells."
Working with 70 specimens of lung cancer tissue and 31 laboratory-grown lines of lung cancer cells, the investigators used high-resolution machinery to scan the cells' chromosomes in 115,000 locations. They found several areas that had already been identified as having copy-number errors, plus five new ones -- two where genes had been deleted, and three where they had been highly over-copied.
The next step will be to identify the specific genes involved in these alterations. That, in turn, could lead to new diagnostic tests and treatments for lung cancer, by far the most common form of cancer in the United States, and one of the most difficult to treat.
There is increasing evidence that therapies aimed at specific gene abnormalities can be effective in treating cancer. Last year, for example, Meyerson and colleagues demonstrated that the drug Iressa shrank tumors in patients with the most common form of lung cancer who carry an abnormality, or mutation, in a single gene.
Meyerson, who is also an associated professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, points out that the presence of copy-number changes doesn't guarantee that genes in the identified regions are involved in cancer. "We'll need to characterize the genes in these regions in detail to understand their role and whether they are cancer-causing or cancer-preventing genes," he remarks.
Co-author of the study are: Barbara Weir, PhD, Thomas LaFramboise, MD, Ming Lin, Rameen Beroukhim, MD, PhD, Levi Garraway, MD, PhD, Javad Beheshti, MD, Jeffrey Lee, Pasi Janne, MD, PhD, Cheng Li, PhD, and William Sellers, MD, of Dana-Farber; Katsuhiko Naoki, MD, PhD, of Yokohama Municipal Citizen's Hospital in Yokohama, Japan; William Richards, PhD, David Sugarbaker, MD, Fei Chen, and Mark Rubin, MD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital; Luc Girard, PhD, and John Minna, MD, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas; and David Christiani, MD, of the Harvard School of Public Health.
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