PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 11-Aug-2014 Contact: Dana Weidig weidigd@email.chop.edu 267-426-6092 Children's Hospital of Philadelphia How genes affect intelligence is complicated. Multiple genes, many yet unknown, are thought to interact among themselves and with environmental factors to influence the diverse abilities involved in intelligence. A large new genetic study in thousands of children and adolescents offers early glimpses of the overall patterns and connections among cognitive abilities such as language reasoning, reading skill and types of memory. The findings may lead to new tools in understanding human cognitive development and neuropsychiatric disorders. "This research is one of the first to use a molecular genetic approach to evaluate complex cognitive traits in a pediatric sample," said one of the study's two co-senior leaders, Hakon Hakonarson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Uncovering the genetic architecture of these diverse cognitive abilities may offer new insights into cognitive development and may ultimately allow investigators to identify useful biomarkers for diagnosing and predicting risks of neuropsychiatric conditions." The study appeared online July 15 in Molecular Psychiatry. Hakonarson's co-senior author is psychiatrist Raquel Gur, M.D., Ph.D., director of Neuropsychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University … Continue reading →

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 11-Aug-2014 Contact: Lisa Anderson lisama2@gwu.edu 202-994-3121 George Washington University WASHINGTON (Aug. 11, 2014) According to a recent World Health Organization report of the leading causes of death worldwide, one-third of all deaths are due to infectious and parasitic diseases. There are currently no vaccines for parasitic nematode (PN), or worm infections in humans, and development of new drugs and vaccines will stall until researchers have a better understanding of PN biology. John Hawdon, Ph.D., associate professor of microbiology, immunology, and tropical medicine at the George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine and Health Sciences, was recently awarded $430,722 from the National Institutes of Health to develop a model system to study PN infection, which will lead to greater understanding of the infective process and the host's immune response to infection. Due to the requirement of an obligate host and lack of good animal models, investigations have been previously limited. However, thanks to an interdisciplinary team, which includes Hawdon, Damien O'Halloran, Ph.D., and Ioannis Eleftherianos, Ph.D., both assistant professors of biology at the GW Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, a viable model will be developed using the insect PN Heterorhabditis bacteriophora. "The techniques we are developing will … Continue reading →

Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only Newswise INDIANAPOLIS -- Researchers have discovered a previously unknown cardiac molecule that could provide a key to treating, and preventing, heart failure. The newly discovered molecule provides the heart with a tool to block a protein that orchestrates genetic disruptions when the heart is subjected to stress, such as high blood pressure. When the research team, led by Ching-Pin Chang, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, restored levels of the newly discovered molecule in mice experiencing heart failure, the progression to heart failure was stopped. The research was published in the online edition of the journal Nature. The newly discovered molecule is known as a long non-coding RNA. RNA's usual role is to carry instructions -- the code -- from the DNA in a cell's nucleus to the machinery in the cell that produces proteins necessary for cell activities. In recent years, scientists have discovered several types of RNA that are not involved in protein coding but act on their own. The role in the heart of long non-coding RNA has been unknown. But the researchers determined that the newly discovered non-coding RNA, which they named … Continue reading →