Published October 21, 2014 A genetic trait protects many women of Latin American descent from breast cancer, researchers probing the ethnic biology of cancer said Monday. If confirmed, the finding may lead to more effective genetic testing for women at risk, by helping to determine who most needs to take preventative measures. Breast cancer is the most common cause of cancer among women. Generally, fewer Hispanic women develop breast cancer and fewer of them die from it, compared with women of European or African-American ancestry, medical statistics show. On Monday, an international team led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, said they now know why. A single difference in just one of the three billion letters of biochemical DNA code in the human genome makes Latinas who inherit it about 40 percent less likely to develop breast cancer, medical geneticist Laura Fejerman and her colleagues reported Monday in Nature Communications. If women have inherited the variation from both sides of their family, they are 80 percent less likely to get breast cancer. It is strongly protective, said cancer specialist Elad Ziv at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, who helped conduct the study funded by … Continue reading →

By Kate Seamons Newser "The Illustrated Police News" on display during a press preview for the exhibition "Jack the Ripper and the East End" at the Museum in Docklands, London, on May 14, 2008.(AP Photo/Akira Suemori) Last month brought the news that Jack the Ripper had been identified, at least according to an amateur detective who claimed in a new book that DNA evidence from a blood-soaked shawl found near one of the victims pointed to a Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. But Russell Edwards' claim was dogged by issues: The shawl's provenance was shaky, a peer-reviewed journal hadn't published the finding, and the molecular biologist Edwards used to arrive at his conclusion had to make use of mitochondrial, rather than genomic, DNA. Now, a fourth hole: That expert, Jari Louhelainen, made a serious "error in nomenclature," according to a group of DNA experts who pored over the finding at casebook.org. They say these two sentences from Edwards' book are the smoking gun: As the Independent reports, the experts say Louhelainen referenced the wrong mutation from the GMI's mtDNA database; it should be "315.1C" rather than "314.1C." And the issue is that 315.1C isn't rare at all. As one writer … Continue reading →