Genome Engineering

It’s Friday again – have a look at BioTechniques’ Lab Grammys 2012: Science Parody of the Year (with thanks to American Biotechnologist).

Hearing loss can be caused by advancing years, or by head injuries or loud noises, all of which lead to loss of the sensory hair cells . A new gene therapy could have potential to replace the damaged hair cells, but isn’t likely to be the answer by itself. The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience . Sound [...]

Hints & tips from Nucleic Acids Research : FusionAnalyser – a new graphical, event-driven tool for fusion rearrangements discovery. Gene fusions are common driver events in leukaemias and solid tumours. FusionAnalyser is a tool dedicated to the identification of driver fusion rearrangements in human cancer through the analysis of paired-end high-throughput transcriptome sequencing data.

Hints & tips from American Biotechnologist: Top 8 reasons for high background noise on your western blot.

It’s Friday, so have a break and play the Genome Engineering game for May – Cut It Out . Build DNA sequences of A, T, G and C on the game board, and find the enzymes that will cut these sequences by matching cards from the bottom with the sequences on the board. Once the sequence is cut you [...]

The ‘body clock’ or circadian rhythms controls things like alertness, sleep patterns, appetite and hormones, and travelling across time zones or working nights can disturb it. Researchers from the University of Sydney and from the Salk Institute have worked on how the genes behind this are controlled and their research was published in Nature. The researchers found that two nuclear receptors [...]

After the genome, the proteome and the lipidome, now the beard-ome…

Thanks to American Biotechnologist for this!

Naturally blond hair is found almost entirely in Northern Europe and Oceania – but is it from the same gene? In the Solomon Islands, 5-10% of the population is blond and research led by Stanford University School of Medicine has shown that the mutation leading to blond hair arose separately here. The research was published in Science. The [...]

Not really a story about genetics or genomics, but a nice piece of science. In JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry writes a question and gets the answer in writing on the pages of a diary. A team of Australian researchers have developed a blood test , published in Angewandte Chemie , where the blood type results [...]

DNA gets broken, and this could give rise to cancer. However, the broken end of the DNA is able to use a similar sequence for repair, and researchers at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology have found out how this works , in a paper published in Molecular Cell . A protein structure called RecA forms on [...]

Genome Engineering features in this month’s Carnival of Evolution, hosted by the Melbourne-based Evolving Thoughts blog. Have a read – there’s some good stuff there.

New mothers have long been told that ‘breast is best’ for their babies, and new research published in Genome Biology adds to the evidence. The researchers looked at the gut microbiome and found that breastfeeding changed the way that the babies expressed immune system genes. The guts of babies become colonised with bacteria after birth, and the microbial make-up [...]

Science has announced the fifth year of its Dance Your PhD international competition, where you translate your graduate work into an interpretive dance that captures the essence of your work, is a piece of creative art, and presents your research in a way that anyone can understand. Start by looking at last year’s finalists (or McGill’s dance for cancer [...]

A recent study, described as “landmark” by sponsor Cancer Research UK, has used genetic biomarkers to split cancer up into 10 types, based on clusters of genetic markers, and these could help predict which treatments would be more effective, and what the outcomes for patients are likely to be. Read more in FierceBiomarkers…

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have brought the $1000 genome a step closer by developing a high-speed genomic sequencing device, as part of a nearly decade-long drive by the National Human Genome Research Institute to bring the cost of sequencing a human genome down to $1,000. “The low cost–if it can be achieved–would enable genomic sequencing to [...]

NextBio has launched NextBio Clinical, extending its existing life sciences platform to translational medicine applications such as biomarker discovery and clinical trial optimization by adding in curated genomic, molecular and clinical profiles from thousands of individual patients to the platform’s existing repository of data from animal and cell line models. NextBio Clinical aggregates and correlates terabyte-scale collections [...]

According to an analysis of the nuclear DNA of polar bears, brown bears and black bears published in Science, polar bears evolved around 600,000 years ago, making them four times older than previously thought. This extra time explains how they have managed to adapt so well to the conditions of the arctic. Previous studies of mitochondrial DNA suggested [...]

Following on from the creation of a cell based on a synthetic genome and the synthetic mouse mitochondrial genome in 2010, and proteins based on ‘unnatural’ DNA sequences and the poem inserted as a synthetic gene into a bacterium in 2011, the next step towards synthetic life is the creation of a synthetic genetic polymer, XNA, that is capable of [...]

Psoriasis is an autoimmune skin disorder that leads to scaly patches on the skin, causing itching and pain. Around 30% of people develop arthritis, and the disorder can have a severe impact on patients’ quality of life. Psoriasis is inherited, and researchers have linked a gene and an environmental factor with plaque psoriasis , the most common form [...]

Hints & tips: A fluorescent DNA toolkit. These reagents open up new future applications of Cy3B, including more sensitive single-molecule and cell-imaging studies.