A decade-old international effort to map the human genetic code is expected to wrap up this summer, giving scientists all the information they need to identify the genes behind diseases ranging from diabetes to heart disease.
Before researchers can turn the wealth of data provided by the Human Genome Project into new medical treatments, they'll need tiny tools to rearrange genes or gene parts and monitor the impacts. Now, University of Florida researchers are reporting success in developing a molecule that may serve as one such tool. Researchers have also created other tools that may identify disease or toxins in single cells before they invade the body.
On Thursday, in an achievement widely heralded as a first, researchers in France announced they had used gene therapy to cure a rare immune disorder. The UF research, which created a synthetic DNA molecule, has the potential to play a role in such achievements by allowing researchers to monitor the impacts of genetic therapy.
"This could be a way to ensure that you're producing the proper amounts of a substance or chemical, or the amounts that you expected for whatever time period you wanted," said Sheldon Schuster, professor and program director of the University of Florida's Biotechnology Program and one of the researchers.
Weihong Tan, an assistant professor of chemistry at UF and the UF Brain Institute, recently collaborated with Schuster and two other UF researchers to construct what the researchers describe as a "synthetic DNA beacon."
Published earlier this year in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a prominent international chemistry journal, the research by Tan, Schuster and UF researchers Jeffery Li and Xiaohong Fang produced a molecule that contains a "photophore," a substance that lights up only in the presence of a target protein, DNA or RNA molecule. Researchers can use laboratory equipment to monitor when the light appears, allowing them to determine the absence or p
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Contact: Aaron Hoover
ahoover@ufl.edu
352-392-0186
University of Florida
27-Apr-2000