Category Archives: Genetics

An announcement is expected on Thursday, and the companies hope to complete the transaction by the end of the year. Ambry Genetics declined to comment. The Japanese government is helping to drive the diversification efforts. A state-backed investment fund, the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, is teaming up with Konica Minolta in the Ambry acquisition. According to the people familiar with the deal, Konica Minolta would take a 60 percent share in Ambry, with the rest to be acquired by the fund. Ambry, which is privately held, would retain its current leadership, these people said. The management team includes the company founder and chairman, Charles L. M. Dunlop, who has said his own experience with prostate cancer now in remission influenced his decision to make public anonymized information from Ambrys database. Pooling data from many people is considered crucial to finding genetic elements that contribute to illnesses. For Konica Minolta, the acquisition would confirm the acceleration of efforts to diversify beyond photocopiers and printers, areas where revenue and profit have been shrinking. The Japanese company has identified health care, and cancer screening in particular, as a possible mainstay of business. It has been developing its own cancer-detecting technology using light-emitting … Continue reading →

Family photo provided by Katie Rosenbaum via AP WASHINGTON Colon cancer. Uterine cancer. Pancreatic cancer. Whatever the tumor, the more gene mutations lurking inside, the better chance your immune system has to fight back. Thats the premise behind the recent approval of a landmark drug, the first cancer therapy ever cleared based on a tumors genetics instead of the body part it struck first. Now thousands of patients with worsening cancer despite standard treatment can try this immunotherapy as long as genetic testing of the tumor shows theyre a candidate. Its like having a lottery ticket, said Johns Hopkins oncologist Dr. Dung Le, who helped prove the new use for the immunotherapy Keytruda. Weve got to figure out how to find these patients, because its such a great opportunity for them. Today, doctors diagnose tumors by where they originate breast cancer in the breast, colon cancer in the colon and use therapies specifically tested for that organ. In contrast, the Food and Drug Administration labeled Keytruda the first tissue-agnostic treatment, for adults and children. The reason: Seemingly unrelated cancers occasionally carry a common genetic flaw called a mismatch repair defect. Despite small studies, FDA found the evidence convincing that for … Continue reading →

VOL. 132 | NO. 135 | Monday, July 10, 2017 A pair of scientists in Memphis is using almost $2 million in grant money to make improvements to an online database and open-source software system called GeneNetwork, used by researchers to study genetic differences and evaluate disease risk. Drs. Robert Williams and Saunak Sen, both part of the faculty at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, won a grant from the National Institutes of Health for the project. GeneNetwork was launched in 2001 as part of a NIH Human Brain Project grant to UTHSC and was one of the first websites designed for gene mapping. Williams, who chairs the Department of Genetics, Genomics and Informatics at UTHSC, said the grant money will be used to support major upgrades for the software infrastructure for gene mapping and analysis for the system. One of the systems main uses, he said, is being able to predict more accurate health outcomes from genetic and environmental data. The system itself is like a combination of Microsofts popular Excel spreadsheet software paired with large amounts of financial data. Except in this case, its biological rather than financial data, combined with a sophisticated spreadsheet that allows … Continue reading →

THERE is growing interest in increasing Angus content of calves in Northern Australian beef herds in an effort to improve overall beef quality and to maximise the profitability of beef operations. This is most likely to occur through the use of Angus or Angus derived bulls (in natural mating or AI programs) over Bos indicus cows to produce crossbred progeny. For successful long-term infusion of Angus genetics, breeding strategies aimed at identifying and enhancing the adaptability of Angus genetics for Northern Australian production systems is vital. In a collaborative project, CSIRO and Angus Australia are exploring funding opportunities to undertake a project aimed at investigating the potential for DNA pooling, a cost-effective methodology applicable for use in large scale commercial herds, to identify Angus genetics suited to the production environment in Northern Australia, by estimating the contribution of individual sires to traits of interest (e.g. coat type, heat tolerance). The project would involve collecting phenotypes for traits related to adaptation and genomic profiles on 1000 Angus cross progeny bred in Northern Australia sired by registered Angus bulls. It is envisaged that information generated from this project will inform commercial producers when making important Angus bull selection decisions for Northern Australia. … Continue reading →

I. Genetics And BehaviorP. L. Broadhurst BIBLIOGRAPHY II. Demography and Population GeneticsJean Sutter BIBLIOGRAPHY III. Race and GeneticsJ. N. Spuhler BIBLIOGRAPHY Behavior genetics is a relatively new cross-disciplinary specialization between genetics and Psychology. It is so new that it hardly knows what to call itself. The term behavior genetics is gaining currency in the United States; but in some quarters there, and certainly elsewhere, the term psycho-genetics is favored. Logically, the best name would be genetical psychology, since the emphasis is on the use of the techniques of genetics in the analysis of behavior rather than vice versa; but the in evitable ambiguity of that term is apparent. Psy chologists generally use the terms genetic or genetical in two senses: in the first and older sense of developmental, or ontogenetic; and in the second, more recent usage relating to the analysis of inheritance. The psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term genetic before the turn of the century to denote developmental studies (witness the Journal of Genetic Psychology), and Alfred Binet even used the term psychogenetic in this sense. But with the rapid rise of the discipline now known as genetics after the rediscovery of the Mendelian laws in 1900, … Continue reading →

This article is about the general scientific term. For the scientific journal, see Genetics (journal). Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in living organisms.[1][2] It is generally considered a field of biology, but it intersects frequently with many of the life sciences and is strongly linked with the study of information systems. The father of genetics is Gregor Mendel, a late 19th-century scientist and Augustinian friar. Mendel studied 'trait inheritance', patterns in the way traits were handed down from parents to offspring. He observed that organisms (pea plants) inherit traits by way of discrete "units of inheritance". This term, still used today, is a somewhat ambiguous definition of what is referred to as a gene. Trait inheritance and molecular inheritance mechanisms of genes are still primary principles of genetics in the 21st century, but modern genetics has expanded beyond inheritance to studying the function and behavior of genes. Gene structure and function, variation, and distribution are studied within the context of the cell, the organism (e.g. dominance) and within the context of a population. Genetics has given rise to a number of sub-fields including epigenetics and population genetics. Organisms studied within the broad field span the … Continue reading →

Some cells are visible to the unaided eye The smallest objects that the unaided human eye can see are about 0.1 mm long. That means that under the right conditions, you might be able to see an ameoba proteus, a human egg, and a paramecium without using magnification. A magnifying glass can help you to see them more clearly, but they will still look tiny. Smaller cells are easily visible under a light microscope. It's even possible to make out structures within the cell, such as the nucleus, mitochondria and chloroplasts. Light microscopes use a system of lenses to magnify an image. The power of a light microscope is limited by the wavelength of visible light, which is about 500 nm. The most powerful light microscopes can resolve bacteria but not viruses. To see anything smaller than 500 nm, you will need an electron microscope. Electron microscopes shoot a high-voltage beam of electrons onto or through an object, which deflects and absorbs some of the electrons. Resolution is still limited by the wavelength of the electron beam, but this wavelength is much smaller than that of visible light. The most powerful electron microscopes can resolve molecules and even individual atoms. … Continue reading →

Introduction Genetics is the branch of science that deals with how you inherit physical and behavioural characteristics including medical conditions. Your genes are a set of instructions for the growth and development of every cell in your body. For example, they determine characteristics such as your blood group and the colour of your eyes and hair. However, many characteristics aren't due to genes alone environment also plays an important role. For example, children may inherit 'tall genes' from their parents, but if their diet doesn't provide them with the necessary nutrients, they may not grow very tall. Genes are packaged in bundles called chromosomes. In humans, each cell in the body contains 23 pairs of chromosomes 46 in total. You inherit one of each pair of chromosomes from your mother and one from your father. This means there are two copies of every gene in each cell, with the exception of the sex chromosomes, X and Y. The X and Y chromosomes determine the biological sex of a baby. Babies with a Y chromosome (XY) will be male, whereas those without a Y chromosome will be female (XX). This means that males only have one copy of each X chromosome … Continue reading →

Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. Barely out of his teens, Zhao Bowen is leading a multimillion-dollar research effort to solve a genetic mystery: What makes people like him so smart? And how can we make more of them? David Hogsholt Zhao Bowen is late for a Satanic heavy metal concert. After haggling the doorman down to half price, he pushes into a Beijing bar with a ceiling low enough to punch. He follows the shriek of guitars down a corridor and into a mosh pit lit by strobe lights. Its hot as hell and looks like it too: Men onstage made up as demons are slashing through a song about damnationthe lyrics are in Englishwhile headbangers worship at their feet. Zhao dives in. The strobes capture midair collisions of bodies, sprays of sweat. Someones glasses fly off and are crushed underfoot. Over the faces of the onlookers spreads that distinctive look of thrill and fear that tends to presage a riot. But just then the song climaxes in a weird screamgasm and the band takes a break. The crowd responds with the ultimate compliment, chanting Niu bi! and pumping their fists. The phrase can be roughly translated … Continue reading →

01/14/2016 research article Sensory neuron diversity is required for organisms to decipher complex environmental cues. Qingyun Li and colleagues highlight the importance of the early prepatterning gene regulatory network as a modulator ofsensory organ precursorand terminally differentiated olfactory receptor neurondiversity in Drosophila. 01/20/2016 research article Telomeres shorten with each cell division and telomere dysfunction is a recognized hallmark of aging. Madalena Carneiro and colleagues show that telomere shortening and DNA damage in key tissues triggers not only local dysfunction but also anticipates the onset of age-associated diseases in other tissues, including cancer. 01/20/2016 research article The thymic medulla is known to be an essential site for the deletion of auto-reactive T cells. Rumi Satoh and colleagues show thatStat3 meditated signal via EGF-R is required for the postnatal development of thymic medullary regions. 01/21/2016 Viewpoints Stephanie Dyke and colleagues examine the variation in data use conditions that are based on consent provisions for genomics datasets in research and clinical settings. Image credit: Duncan Hull, Flickr, CC BY Image credit: K. Adam Bohnert and Kathleen Gould Image credit: Hey Paul Studios, Flickr, CC BY 12/23/2015 review Albino Bacolla and colleagues discuss recent advances on three-stranded (triplex) nucleic acids, with an emphasis on … Continue reading →