http://www.the-scientist.com/community/forums/show/17.page JForum - http://www.jforum.net
Much has changed -- in science, in politics, in life -- since 2000. Researchers are essentially finished fully sequencing the human genome, HapMap shed a lot of light on genetic variants between different people, and gene annotation is proceeding at full tilt.

How will you celebrate or commemorate the first draft's anniversary this year? How should we?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,

Bob Grant -- Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist [/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/926/5121.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/926/5121.page GMT
On the other hand, knowing your likelihood of getting preventable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer could help you take steps towards a healthier lifestyle and early detection that could save your life, says private health insurer NIB. Motivated by these potential benefits, NIB is offering half-price genetic tests to 5,000 of its members. That's a discount of $550 that could cost the company $2.75 million, [url="http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2820385.htm"]ABC reports[/url].

Not surprisingly, this move has rekindled some old concerns about genetic discrimination. The health insurance branch of NIB, however, would not have access to the data, and could therefore not use the information in determining its rates. But the company does admit that there could be other consequences. For example, its customers may be required to turn the information over to life insurance companies ([url="http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/editorial/gene-testing-exposes-us-all-to-discrimination-20100215-o2ta.html"]including NIB[/url]), which could in turn raise their premiums. Still, they hold that the benefits of understanding one's health risks outweigh any such issues.

Is NIB right? Is knowing your genetic makeup likely to promote healthier behavior, and if so, is that worth the risk of any genetic discrimination you might face in the future? And will the GINA suffice to protect us from the risk such prejudice?

--Jef Akst, Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist[/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/872/4904.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/872/4904.page GMT
Members of the Turkey Genome Sequencing Consortium say they'll use the boost of more than $900,000 from the USDA to employ next generation sequencing platforms and to annotate the genome, deciphering the intricacies of the delicious bird's DNA. They've only got about 10% of the genome left to go, so the turkey's genome should be waddling onto GenBank any day now.

With the maize genome recently [url=http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/326/5956/1071]published[/url] in [i]Science[/i], we're inching closer to a Thanksgiving dinner that is fully sequenced. (Anybody know when the pumpkin pie genome is due?)

How crucial do you think sequencing the genome's of agriculturally important species is? Should we be focusing more genomic research on the plants and animals that we eat?

Bob Grant -- Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist[/i]



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This is an interesting finding for sure, but if we look hard enough, won't we find a genetic correlate for everything? Can we really 'blame' genetics for all of our imperfections?

--Jef Akst, Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist[/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/753/4176.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/753/4176.page GMT
Will the technology keep up with the science? What will the integration of computers and genetics bring to the field of vaccine research, and what other areas of science will it benefit?

--Jef Akst, Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist[/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/730/4062.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/730/4062.page GMT
[quote]The UK should plough £2bn ($3.3bn) into crop research to help stave off world hunger, says the Royal Society.

It says the world's growing population means food production will have to rise by about 50% in 40 years and the UK can lead the research needed.

Approaches it endorses include genetic modification, improved irrigation and systems of growing crops together that reduce the impact of diseases.

It says that rising yields have brought "complacency" over food supplies.

Earlier in the year, the G8 pledged to spend $20bn (£12bn) improving food security for the developing world.


Professor Sir David Baulcombe: ''We have to look at all the options that we have''
The Royal Society's report, Reaping the Benefits: Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Global Agriculture, concludes that science has to have a significant role if the food supply is to be maintained in 2050, when the world population may have reached nine billion.

The Green Revolution that created new high-yielding strains of crops such as rice and maize in the 1950s and 60s reduced hunger and improved food security, it says, but a new push is needed quickly.

"We need to take action now to stave off food shortages," said Professor Sir David Baulcombe from Cambridge University who chaired the study.

"If we wait even five to 10 years, it may be too late.

"In the UK we have the potential to come up with viable scientific solutions for feeding a growing population, and we have a responsibility to realise this potential."

GM divide

In June, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said there were now one billion hungry people in the world - "the first time in history" there had been so many.


Celebrities such as Sir Paul McCartney have embraced the anti-GM cause
Although it said rising unemployment and lower incomes were to blame for recent increases in the number of hungry people, investment in science to increase the supply of food was also needed.

The Royal Society says the UK should spend £200m per year for the next 10 years on food-oriented research.

Short-term plans could involve improving irrigation so water is used more efficiently, and promoting management patterns where plants are grown together for the benefit of crops.

Techniques include growing plants around the edges of agricultural fields that attract predators of insect pests.

Investment should also go into advanced plant-breeding technologies, including genetic modification.

Although acknowledging the approach can lead to problems such as the unwanted spread of inserted genes into neighbouring wild plants, it says the genetic modification can in principle produce crop strains resistant to disease, drought, salinity, heat and toxic heavy metals.

Experimental strains resistant to drought and salinity are showing promise, it says - conclusions that were welcomed by the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC), the UK group representing companies in the field.

"Food security is one of the biggest challenges we currently face," said ABC's chairman Julian Little.

"Advanced crop breeding using biotechnology and GM methods... are already being used by more than 13 million farmers around the world and helping to deliver higher and more reliable crop yields while mitigating major threats to crop production, such as damaging effects of pests, diseases and droughts."

But environmental groups were less enthusiastic.

"The bottom line is that governments have made the wrong R&D investments, focusing research on unrealised biotech solutions, rather than on the needs of poorer farmers", said Becky Price, a researcher with GeneWatch UK.

"The use of transgenics is often described as a powerful tool. However to date, the only widely used traits developed by genetic modification are herbicide tolerance and Bt insect resistance."

Herbicide tolerant crops are made resistant to a proprietary weedkiller, while Bt crops include genes that produce an insect-killing toxin.

The Royal Society also said that climate change is likely to increase the scale of the "challenge" ahead, by decreasing crop yields in most parts of the world.

[/quote]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/705/3682.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/705/3682.page GMT
[url=http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/32.page]Bio-potatoes have prevented the Irish Potato Famine?[/url]
[url=http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/201.page]Potato Genome Sequencing[/url]

[url=http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre58856b-us-blight-genome/]Irish potato famine genome[/url]
[quote]Scientists have unlocked the genetic code of late blight -- the plant pathogen that sparked the Irish potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s -- and it is revealing clues about why it has been such a formidable foe.

"The genome is much larger than some of its relatives. The reason is it is full of these jumping genes that copy themselves," said Chad Nusbaum of the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, whose study was published in the journal Nature.

Nusbaum said nearly 75 percent of the genome is filled with repetitive DNA that appears to evolve quickly, allowing for the rapid development of genes that can attack plant hosts.

That could help explain how the disease has been able to attack potatoes genetically bred to resist the infection, he said in a telephone interview.

"The late blight has been a tremendously challenging organism through the ages. There are only poor pesticides to use against it, even now if you use the most horrible stuff," Nusbaum said.

The disease, spread by spores, remains a threat to global food security. In the United States, it is currently killing potato and tomato plants in home gardens from Maine to Ohio and threatening commercial and organic farms.

It causes large mold-ringed olive-green or brown spots on leaves and blackened stems and can wipe out a crop in days.

To understand how the pathogen has been so successful, the researchers decoded its genome and compared it to the genomes of two relatives: P. sojae, which infects soybeans, and P. ramorum, which causes a condition known as sudden oak death in oak and other trees.

They said the late blight genome is 2.5 to four times larger, and has two distinct regions. One is full of copies of DNA that is undergoing rapid change. This area contains just a handful of genes which play a role in plant infection.

The other area contains genes that have been preserved over millions of years of evolution.

Nusbaum said the strategy appears to allow for the rapid birth of many hundreds of "attack genes" that are evolving much faster than the host plant.

It may take years to figure out what the genes do, he said, but researchers now have more tools to study them.
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She picks the [url=http://www.dinofish.com/]coelacanth[/url], a living fossil of a fish.

I think I'd like to see either another marsupial or another monotreme sequenced. It appears that the [url=http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53187/]differences[/url] between marsupials and placental mammals stem from non-coding regions of DNA rather than genes and proteins. And when researchers sequenced the [url=http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22471/]platypus[/url], they found 10 sex chromosomes! There has to be more insights lurking in the genomes of our mammalian cousins Down Under.

So what would you like to see sequenced?

Bob Grant, Associate Editor - [i]The Scientist[/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/633/3313.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/633/3313.page GMT
An international team of researchers, who present their findings in the current issue of the open access journal [i]BMC Genetics[/i], studied mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal genetic data from people belonging to two of the major Central Asian language groups -- Turkic and Indo-Iranian. They found that Y-chromosomal sequences differ more between populations of the same ethic group than they do between people of different ethnicities. The opposite, however, was true for mtDNA in the Turkic group.

So what do you think? Is ethnicity purely a social construct that encourages some degree of genetic isolation or do genetic differences define ethnic groups, races, etc.? Are the roots of ethnicity in the mind or in the blood?

Bob Grant - Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist[/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/626/3288.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/626/3288.page GMT
A mutation in the[i] MC1R [/i]gene, which belongs to a family of genes that code for pain receptors, is blamed for the increased sensitivity, according to recent [url=http://jada.ada.org/cgi/content/abstract/140/7/896] research [/url] published in [i]The Journal of the American Dental Association[/i].

I'm curious to hear from our redheaded readers. Do you find the dentist even more unpleasant than the rest of us do? Is this finding something you've suspected your whole life?

Bob Grant - Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist[/i]

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[quote]Genetically modified crops are being grown in Britain for the first time in 12 months after controversial trials were resumed without alerting the public, a newspaper reported Monday.

Cultivation of a field of potatoes designed to be resistant to pests was abandoned more than a year ago when environmental protesters ripped up the crop, the Daily Telegraph said.

But, without alerting the public, the project near Tadcaster in northern England has been restarted, prompting warnings from green groups that local farms and residents could be put at risk, the newspaper said.

One group accused the government of trying to "slip it under the radar."

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the potatoes would be grown in a safe environment, where there is no risk of contamination. They would not be used for human or animal consumption, it said.

The trial, run by Leeds University, is looking at potatoes that are resistant to a parasite worm that costs British farmers millions of pounds a year in lost and damaged crops.

Genetically-modified crops have a gene, or genes, inserted into them in the lab so that they acquire traits that are useful to farmers.

They are widely grown in North America, South America and China.

But in Europe they have run into fierce resistance, led by green groups who say the crops carry risks through cross-pollination, potentially creating "super-weeds" that are impervious to herbicides.

Only a handful of genetically modified crops have been approved for cultivation in the European Union, but of them only MON810, approved in 1998, is so far being grown.

France this month rejected a report by the European Union's food safety watchdog that said a controversial strain of genetically-modified corn was safe.
[/quote]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/569/2930.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/569/2930.page GMT
I tend to question the safety of these crops. I'm sure they are fine, but let others try them. :beeker:

[quote]
Genetic modification may be the only viable way to produce sufficient quantities of rice in the future as drought, climate change and dwindling acreage impact yields, experts said in a new report.

Rice is the staple food of around three billion people and the main challenge facing producers is how to raise yields of the water-dependent crop as 70 percent of the world's food-growing areas turn increasingly parched, said the International Rice Research Institute in its latest quarterly magazine.

Biotechnology, the process of modifying the genes of an organism to produce new products, is becoming an increasingly important tool for the Philippines-based institute as it tackles the impact of climate change, IRRI said in its "Rice Today" publication.

The institute, based in the university town of Los Banos south of Manila, developed many of the high-yielding varieties of rice during the so-called Green Revolution of agricultural breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Former IRRI director-general Nyle Brady said the institute must use biotechnology to "develop rice lines that efficiently utilise plant nutrients, that tolerate adverse conditions such as drought, and that are resistant to insects and diseases" to reduce the need for pesticides.

Brady said he recognised "the political reasons why this is difficult because some countries don't want biotechnology to be used for this purpose.

"But the developing countries need the improved crops much more than we do in the United States," Brady added.

Gurdev Khush, a University of California professor who was a former senior IRRI scientist, agrees "the environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good as it should be."

The institute estimates between 15-20 million hectares (about 37-49 million acres) of irrigated rice would be hit by "some degree of water scarcity" by 2025.

Areas growing genetically modified crops rose 9.4 percent from a year earlier to more than 120 million hectares across 25 countries last year, it said.
[/quote]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/562/2872.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/562/2872.page GMT
One of the largest companies offering the service is [url=http://www.africanancestry.com/index.html?ck=0ZsZkh81AfQ5qERR&vid=0ZsZkh81AfY5qNr3&cktime=79135]African Ancestry[/url]. Their test kits run from $200-300 and, according to the company, can "determine which present-day African country you share ancestry with."

Some scientists, such as University of Texas geneticist [url=http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/anthropology/faculty/profiles/Bolnick/Deborah/]Deborah Bolnick[/url], are dubious about the company's claims and say that its genetic databases are too narrow to pinpoint countries of genetic origin.

What do you think? Are African Americans wasting their money by paying for these tests? Can these companies really tell people what region of Africa their ancestors came from using existing technology and databases?

Bob Grant, Associate Editor - [i]The Scientist[/i]

PS - If you haven't seen the PBS special [url=http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/]"African American Lives"[/url] yet, I highly recommend watching it. It covers many high-profile examples of African Americans tracing their genetic heritage.]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/532/2629.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/532/2629.page GMT
But a [url="http://bert.lib.indiana.edu:2146/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08162.html"]recent study[/url] published yesterday in the online edition of [i]Nature[/i] challenges this long-standing belief that sperm are nothing more than packets of genetic code. Scientists at [url="http://www.huntsmancancer.org/"]Huntsman Cancer Institute[/url] at the University of Utah School of Medicine found that mature, human sperm have extensive epigenetic markings, particularly at loci that are important in development.

Maybe we have a little more than we realized to be thanking our fathers for this Father's Day.

--Jef Akst, intern, [i]The Scientist[/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/516/2517.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/516/2517.page GMT We invite community members to kindly annotate your favorite gene. For every gene you annotate or edit you will be rewarded by micro- attribution system in the wiki.
You can visit Zebrafish GenomeWiki at: http://fishwiki.igib.in/TWiki_4_2_4/bin/view/Main/WebHome

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Now researchers at UC Davis have made a startling discovery: that in olfactory neurons, odor bypasses the normal regulatory pathways in the nucleus and instead boosts synthesis of a protein by acting on RNA, the molecular messengers that typically carry instructions from DNA in the nucleus to protein-building mechanisms in the cell.

"What is unique about this study is that it provides the first evidence that a chemical in our environment changes gene expression in its own, very specific way within a sensory organ," explained Noelle L'Etoile, the study's principal investigator and assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UC Davis's Center for Neuroscience. "This implicates the real importance of RNA in controlling when proteins are made, and shows that the environment can actually change what RNA does."

Probing deep into the molecular pathways of a microscopic worm called C. elegans, L'Etoile and co-author Julia Kaye, a postdoctoral researcher at the center, found that prolonged exposure to an odor boosts production of a protein that curbs the worm's response to the smell, and that this activity happens very close to the area where the smell enters the neuron. Their study appears in the January 15 issue of the journal Neuron.

The regulatory protein guiding this response is also found in an important region of memory formation in the mammalian brain, L'Etoile explained. "So this work could lead to discoveries about the role these proteins play in memory and higher order learning in humans," she said.

To study the molecular basis of smell, the researchers used a population of C. elegans with a mutation that blocks the worms' normal ability to ignore odors that are not linked to food. L'Etoile had earlier found that this mutation occurs in a region of RNA that regulates the expression, or synthesis, of a protein called PKG.

In the new study, they found that RNA in sensory neurons of the defective worms no longer binds to Pumilio proteins, regulatory molecules found in a diversity of species from yeast to humans. This led to their discovery that when normal worms are exposed to the odor of butanone with no food link, a Pumilio protein in the olfactory neuron ratchets up production of PKG, prompting the creatures to eventually lose interest in the smell. The discovery holds an additional, new twist, L'Etoile added: an exciting role reversal for Pumilio proteins, which until now have only been known to suppress protein synthesis.

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Dr. Ingo Helbig, University of Kiel and Department of Neuropediatrics at the University Medical Center Schleswig Holstein, Germany, is first author on this research study: “So far, we didn’t know that microdeletions, loss of entire chromosomal segments including several genes, can also be a cause for common diseases. This finding will help understand why people suffer from common disorders including epilepsies.”

Up to three percent of the population experience epileptic seizures and one percent suffers from epilepsy, which is characterised by recurrent seizures. The researchers hope that understanding how this genetic defect leads to epilepsy will help develop new drugs against seizures. So far, most genes for epilepsy were only found in rare form of epilepsies. However, hereditary factors are long known to play a much larger role, contributing to many common forms of seizure disorders. Hence, the discovery of the 15q13.3 microdeletions in common epilepsies is an important milestone.

44 coauthors contributed to the recent study, which was coordinated by Dr. Thomas Sander from the Cologne Center of Genomic at the University of Cologne, Germany. On a European level, this project included German groups from Berlin, Bonn, Marburg, Ulm as well as groups from Vienna, Copenhagen, Utrecht (NL), Geneva, Troina (Italy), Marseille and Nice. The research study was performed in collaboration with the group of Dr. Evan Eichler at the Department of Genome Sciences and Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Eichler is one of the pioneers of research on microdeletions in human disease.

Many authors on this research papers are part of the European EPICURE project of the European Union, a large consortium dedicated to the research of epilepsies.
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But the vision of individualized treatment based on a patient's genetic makeup and other biological markers has yet to materialize, even if better use of genetic information has led to advances in cancer care and other areas.

Now the pursuit of "personalized medicine" is expected to get a major push from the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama. As a senator, Obama introduced legislation to coordinate the sometimes conflicting policies of government agencies and provide more support for private research. He remains keen on the idea.

"The president-elect has indicated his support for both advancing personalized medicine and increasing (research) funding," said Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I., who has introduced legislation in the House that builds on Obama's.

Obama is also interested in the role that personalized medicine could play as an element of changes in the broader health care system.

"The issue of getting the right treatment to the right person goes with his whole emphasis on health reform," said Mark McClellan, a noted Republican health care expert who served President George W. Bush as Medicare director and head of the Food and Drug Administration. "If we're thinking about reforming the health care system, we should be thinking about what medicine will be like down the road when health care reform is fully implemented," McClellan said.

Although medical science is more technologically advanced than at any time in history, in some ways it is still strikingly old-fashioned. For example, most prescription drugs are effective only in about 60 percent of treated patients, leading to a trial-and-error approach to treatment that not only may be more costly, but can put some patients at risk.

Among patients, the varying responses to medications may be linked to differences in genetic makeup that affect how the body processes a drug. For example, the FDA recently warned that certain drugs for epileptic seizures may prompt a severe skin reaction in Asian patients because of a genetic trait. The practice of medicine could be streamlined if doctors had reliable ways of predicting which drugs would work on which individuals.

Government funding for research helped make possible many of the scientific gains in genetics, and Congress has passed landmark legislation outlawing discrimination against patients on the basis of genetic information.

But the mundane decisions, such as whether or not to pay for some genetic tests, have not progressed that smoothly.

For example, the FDA supported research that found certain genes can make some patients taking the blood thinner Coumadin susceptible to potentially fatal bleeding. The agency has been pushing for some time to make doctors aware of genetic tests that could help their patients.

But Medicare has not yet set a national policy on paying for the tests. Problems with Coumadin, also known as warfarin, are a major cause of emergency room visits for seniors.

"It would be very helpful if you could get (Medicare) and FDA talking to each other," said Edward Abrahams, executive director of the Personalized Medicine Coalition. "Right now they really don't communicate very well, and they have different agendas. The federal government is not coordinated around removing the barriers to personalized medicine." His group represents university research centers, industry and patients.

Obama's legislation would create an interagency group to coordinate the policies of federal agencies whose decisions have an impact on the issue. Kennedy also would direct Medicare to set a fixed policy for coverage of genetic tests and treatments.

Both bills would establish a national 'Biobank' to pool data that could serve as a resource for scientific researchers, and the legislation also calls for increases in federal funding. Obama has proposed a 100 percent tax credit for private research to develop diagnostic tests that can predict the safety and effectiveness of certain high profile drugs.

"So far, we haven't really seen any transformation of medicine," said McClellan. "There are some real questions to deal with to see if there is some policy that could speed it up.

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They claim that privacy will be protected, but would you really want the results of a DNA test incorporated into a social networking site? Or is this just the obvious next step in the fascination -- some might say obsession -- to know one's family tree? I, for one, wouldn't want my genetic profile added to my Facebook profile, even if it could help me find a long lost third cousin twice removed.

Elie Dolgin, Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist[/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/296/1069.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/296/1069.page GMT
These were some of the questions that a panel on ancestry testing discussed today at an American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) press briefing. The accuracy of the tests, said Michael Bamshad from the University of Washington School of Medicine depends on the type of markers used, whether it’s mitochondrial, Y chromosomal or SNP, and the type of reference population used for comparison.

The question of accuracy is closely related to the question of how people react to their genetic results. For some people, it has meant a rethinking their sense of identity, said Charmaine Royal from Duke University. For others, it is just another piece of information. Overall, she said, people had positive feelings about it, despite the level of uncertainty in the data.

The questions, said the panelists, pertain not only to companies that provide the ancestry testing to the public, but also to researchers working on population genetics who – perhaps dangerously - bring the discussion of race to the level of biology.

The goal of the ASHG Ancestry Testing Workgroup Members will be to provide geneticists, both the commercial and academic, with recommendations on how to consider or couch their discussions about race, culture, identity and genetics/genomics.

Do you think ancestry and population testing will fundamentally change the way we identify ourselves? Or are cultural and social definitions more important than those demonstrated by the science?

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The "defects" result from genetic triggers that occur in the embryo and are not, as some have thought, a degenerative condition that starts in adulthood, they said.

Fibres that develop into the moles' lens start to grow normally but are not completed as a result of interference of two genes called PAX6 and FOXE3.

Other genes that are central to eye development also behave abnormally, the researchers found.

Under Darwinian theory, moles and other subterranean animals forego good vision in order to accentuate sensitivity to vibrations and smell that help them survive.

The study was carried out on embryos of the Iberian mole, Talpa occidentalis, which unlike other mole species has permanently closed eyes.

The paper, led by Martin Collinson of the University of Aberdeen, northeastern Scotland, appears in the British-based open-access journal BMC Biology.

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I would be grateful if someone please tell me in simple term what does this question mean.

Thanks in advance.
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Other symptoms of the condition, which shows up in late adolescence or early adulthood, include excessive daytime drowsiness, vivid hallucinations on the threshold of sleep, and the sudden, temporary loss of muscle control, often triggered by emotional shock.

A team of researchers led by Katsushi Tokunaga at the University of Tokyo compared the genetic profiles of persons with and without the sleep-inducing disease.

Across four different ethnic groups, patients with narcolepsy were far more likely to carry a specific mutation of DNA located between two genes, one of which has been associated with sleep regulation and the other with the sleep-wake cycle.

The statistical link was strongest among Japanese, but remained significant among Europeans and persons of African descent as well.

The study also showed that the suspect genetic variant -- known as rs57770917 -- is common among Koreans.

The prevalence of the disease varies widely in different countries. In Europe and the United States, narcolepsy is roughly as common as Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis, affecting on average one in every 2,500 people.

But in Japan the frequency is four times higher, while in Israel only one in half-a-million people have the condition.

There is no known cure for narcolepsy, which is often treated with stimulants to combat daytime fatigue.

Previous studies had already pointed to genetic factors as playing a role.

An immediate family member with narcolepsy increases one's chances of having the disease by 10 to 40 times.

It was found that all Japanese suffering from the disease carried another genetic variant. But fully ten percent of the Japanese population shared that same mutation, so researchers suspected the existence of additional genetic drivers as well.

The authors of the new study said their findings could point the way to "new therapeutic approaches" designed to target the neurochemical reactions patterned by the wayward genetic material.

The research was published in journal Nature Genetics, part of the British-based Nature Publishing Group.[/quote]

[url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080928/ts_afp/healthdiseasesleepnarcolepsy;_ylt=As9aX.gPyv7PGqC_YzZd0t4PLBIF]Original Story[/url]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/225/792.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/225/792.page GMT
[quote]LIMA (Reuters) - Scientists around the world have teamed up to sequence the genome of the potato, hoping to crack the genetic code of one of the world's most important crops at a time of surging population growth and high food prices.

Solanum tuberosum, the scientific name of the humble white potato, looks simple. But it is chock full of mysteries hidden in its 12 chromosomes and 840 million DNA base pairs. Humans, by comparison, have 3 billion DNA base pairs.

The Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium includes scientists in 13 countries from New Zealand to India and Peru who are decoding different pieces of the genome.

It plans to have its work done in 2010 and will then make its findings public so plant breeders can create new seeds resistant to everything from droughts and diseases to extreme temperatures.

"We'll be able to design seeds more effectively and more efficiently after we know precisely which genes do what," said Gisella Orjeda, a biology professor at the Cayetano Heredia University in Lima who runs a lab that is sequencing one of the chromosomes.

Once the white potato genome is sequenced, researchers say it will become easier to identify genes in native and wild species of potatoes, which come in 5,000 varieties.

The potato, the world's third-most important food crop after wheat and rice, is being championed by food security experts who say it could cheaply feed an increasingly hungry world.

The United Nations named 2008 the International Year of the Potato to highlight its potential as an antidote to hunger.

Though the potato originated 8,000 years ago in Peru's Andes mountains, China is now the largest grower of the tuber. More farmers are planting it, especially in developing countries, as the world's population expands by 1 billion a decade.

Orjeda said the potato genome sequencing project, centered in the Netherlands (www.potatogenome.net), could usher in a new era for the potato, which its proponents call history's most important vegetable.

"The potato isn't just important now. It has always been important -- it's what enabled the Industrial Revolution in Europe (by allowing for a population boom), but also what caused the potato famine in Ireland," she said.[/quote]

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Do you think this is a real danger from a scientific perspective?

Bob, Associate Editor, [i]The Scientist[/i]]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/191/639.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/191/639.page GMT