TULSA, Oklahoma - With the New Year comes new resolutions, and for those resolving to lose weight there always seems to be a new plan or diet going around. This year, one Tulsa doctors said we can find out what works best for our body based on our individual DNA. Dr. Michele Neil, with the Functional Medical Institute, said with just a swab from inside your mouth, you can find out what type of exercise is best for your body, and a whole lot more. Christina Cupp has always been an athlete and even competed in body building. She's had lots of coaches over the years and thought she knew what worked best for her body - getting her heart rate up high and keeping it there but when she took the DNA test, she learned she needed to slow down her workouts, drastically increase her protein intake and change her carbs and fat. "The most interesting part was I learned post workout. I'm not supposed to eat carbs for an hour and a half, and I was from the body building world that said eat carbs and protein post work out," Cupp said. Neil, said the DNA test takes … Continue reading →

Channel 4 has attempted to sequence the DNA of famous figures including Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe in new show Dead Famous DNA. The new three-part series - which has taken three years to make - sees presenter Mark Evans trying to find body parts and human relics from historical figures such as Adolf Hitler, Charles Darwin, John F Kennedy, Napoleon, Marlon Brando and King George III in an attempt to learn more about them from their DNA. After paying $2,000 for samples of Presley's hair from his barber, the scientists found that Presley had genetic variants for migraines, obesity and glaucoma - as well as a variant known to cause a heart muscle disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The condition usually occurs in men between the ages of 20 and 40 and causes the thickening of the heart and weakening of the heart muscle. Presley is known to have suffered from some of the symptoms associated with the disease, raising fresh questions about the cause of Presley's death at the age of 42. However, not all of the testing proved so successful, as hair samples from King George III - bought for $5,000 - turned out to be cut from … Continue reading →

Every recipe has both instructions and ingredients. So does the human genome. An error in the instructions can raise the risk for disease. Every cell in your body reads the same genome, the DNA-encoded instruction set that builds proteins. But your cells couldnt be more different. Neurons send electrical messages, liver cells break down chemicals, muscle cells move the body. How do cells employ the same basic set of genetic instructions to carry out their own specialized tasks? The answer lies in a complex, multilayered system that controls how proteins are made. Frey compares the genome to a recipe that a baker might use. All recipes include a list of ingredientsflour, eggs and butter, sayalong with instructions for what to do with those ingredients. Inside a cell, the ingredients are the parts of the genome that code for proteins; surrounding them are the genomes instructions for how to combine those ingredients. Just as flour, eggs and butter can be transformed into hundreds of different baked goods, genetic components can be assembled into many different configurations. This process is called alternative splicing, and its how cells create such variety out of a single genetic code. Frey and his colleagues used a … Continue reading →