SONYA PARPART-LIResearchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Baltimore-based firm Personal Genome Diagnostics have shown that sequencing a patient’s tumor samples alone may not be enough to identify cancer-associated mutations. By also sequencing the patient’s non-tumor tissue, the researchers could separate germline mutations from tumor-specific ones. Their results were published in Science Translational Medicine this week (April 15).
“This paper really emphasizes how important it is to compare an individual patient’s tumor [DNA] to that individual patient’s [normal sequence],” said oncologist George Demetri of Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who was not involved in the study.
“One of the most basic aspects of any scientific approach is to have an analysis and a very good control,” said study coauthor Victor Velculescu of Johns Hopkins, “and this fundamental rule is being violated essentially by a lot of folks doing this type of analysis.”
WIKIMEDIA, RAMAMicrobes in the guts of mice produce metabolites in diurnal patterns that align with the animals’ circadian clock, scientists from the University of Chicago and their colleagues showed in Cell Host & Microbe this week (April 16). And a high-fat diet can disturb these diurnal metabolite production patterns, affecting the mice’s metabolism. In their paper, the team also proposed that “disturbances of host-microbe circadian networks may promote diet-induced obesity.”
“The finding that our microbiome also exhibits diurnal rhythms is interesting since virtually ...
