genome

Scientists Map Bedbug Genome, Follow Pest Through NYC Subway

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Scientists have mapped the genome of bedbugs in New York City, then traced fragments of the nefarious pests’ DNA through the subway system.

In the grubby recesses of hundreds of stations, they discovered surprising genetic diversity among the bloodsucking creatures. The next step is to figure out how the information can be put to good use, such as to develop better insecticides or blood thinners.

But these goals will take further medical research.

For now, the focus is on two main players in New York life: the subway and bedbugs.

Scientists already have found that genetic traces of bedbugs in northern Manhattan are more closely related to those in the island’s southern part, while there are bigger variations between the Upper East Side and Upper West Side.

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The Iceman’s gut bacteria reveals human migration patterns

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Since his discovery in 1991, Ötzi the “Iceman” — an intact, naturally mummified man believed to have lived in the Italian Alps approximately 5,300 years ago — has captured the international imagination and provided a tantalizing glimpse into life during the Copper Age.

Now, a new research project, which analyzed the genetic composition of bacteria in the Iceman’s stomach, is giving scientists insight into not only the Iceman’s personal life, but the history of human geography at large.

The scientists, who published their study in the journal Science on Thursday, focused on a type of common bacteria called Helicobacter pylori, or H. pylori. Found in about two thirds of the world’s population, according to the National Institutes of Health, it usually inhabits the stomach and is capable of causing infections that can lead to ulcers or even stomach cancer.

 

Link to article on Mashable

Ghosts in the Genome How one generation’s experience can affect the next

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In one of the 20th century’s most disastrous collisions of political ideology and science, the Russian botanist Trofim Lysenko steered the USSR’s agricultural research policies to deemphasize the deterministic concepts of Mendelian inheritance. Instead, Lysenko was committed to the idea that, within the space of a single generation, the environment could alter the phenotype of future generations, an idea that is now often (imprecisely) referred to as “Lamarckian” inheritance. In Lysenko’s view, Mendelian inheritance, along with Darwinian evolution, emphasizes competition, whereas he believed that biology was based on cooperation, and that hard work in one generation should rapidly lead to the betterment of the species.

Lysenko was among the most infamous purveyors of the idea that the environment experienced by an organism could influence the phenotype in future generations, and he was rightly denounced as a charlatan because he falsified results in pursuit of his goal. However, the scientific community has discovered over the past few decades that the idea that acquired characters can be inherited may not be completely off the mark. It turns out that epigenetic marks, information not encoded in the genome’s sequence, do respond to environmental conditions within an organism’s lifetime, and recent evidence suggests that such information may be inherited.

These findings have helped motivate modern research into the oft-discredited study of transgenerational effects of the environment. Researchers are now beginning to understand the mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance and to generate evidence for the idea that the experiences of an ancestral population can influence future generations.

 

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Lager-brewing yeast was probably born twice

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Genome of newly discovered parent species shows strains are separate crosses.

 

Guinness stout and Bud Lite differ in, to be conservative, several ways, but one is that they’re brewed with very different types of yeast. Lager isn’t just a beer style, it’s a yeast lifestyle. Humans have been brewing with ale yeast—Saccharomyces cerevisiae—for thousands of years. But it was less than 600 years ago that European brewers stumbled on lager yeast, which behaves very differently and produces that distinctive lager flavor.

 

Read full article at Ars Technica

Misunderstanding the genome:

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A recent Ars feature story about genetic screening generated quite a lively debate in the discussion thread. However, it also underlined just how many misconceptions people have when it comes to genetics. Public perception hasn’t been helped by scientists overhyping their findings or by inaccurate portrayals in the media (GATTACA, anyone?). So today, I’m going to try to clear some common confusions.

Before moving recently to Ars full time, I spent six years working in the policy office of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the part of the National Institutes of Health responsible for the Human Genome Project (along with the UK’s Wellcome Trust). The job gave me a front row seat to the challenge of explaining a horribly complex topic, one where common assumptions are often counterfactual.

Maria Delany’s Ars article does a great job laying out how screening at-risk individuals for mutations in a pair of genes—BRCA1 and BRCA2—can spare people from developing cancer. Delany also explains why there isn’t unanimity among clinicians about rolling out BRCA testing at the population level. At first glance, such testing seems like a no brainer, right? Testing right now is targeted to at-risk groups, like women with a family history of breast cancer, but studies have found those mutations in people with no family history of the disease. If testing people for BRCA mutations finds them before cancer does, where’s the downside?

 

 

Full story at Ars Technica

Using power of computers to harness human genome may provide clues into Ebola virus

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Ramaswamy Narayanan, Ph.D., professor in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science at Florida Atlantic University, is working to blend the power of computers with biology to use the human genome to remove much of the guesswork involved in discovering cures for diseases.

In an article titled “Ebola-Associated Genes in the Human Genome: Implications for Novel Targets,” published in the current MedCrave Online Journal of Proteomics and Bioinformatics, Narayanan describes how key genes that are present in our cells could be used to develop drugs for this disease.

“Bioinformatics is a powerful tool to help us understand biological data,” said Narayanan whose research has focused in this field for more than a decade. “We are mining the human genome for Ebola virus association to develop an understanding of the human proteins involved in this disease for subsequent research and development, and to potentially create a pipeline of targets that we can test and evaluate.”

 

Full Story

Human Proteome Project Finds 193 Previously Unknown Proteins

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Striving for the protein equivalent of the Human Genome Project, an international team of researchers has created an initial catalog of the human “proteome,” or all of the proteins in the human body. In total, using 30 different human tissues, the team identified proteins encoded by 17,294 genes, which is about 84 percent of all of the genes in the human genome predicted to encode proteins.
In a summary of the effort, to be published today in the journal Nature, the team also reports the identification of 193 novel proteins that came from regions of the genome not predicted to code for proteins, suggesting that the human genome is more complex than previously thought. The cataloging project, led by researchers at The Johns Hopkins University and the Institute of Bioinformatics in Bangalore, India, should prove an important resource for biological research and medical diagnostics, according to the team’s leaders.