News tips from The Journal of Neuroscience
...s risk for late-onset AD. An individual with two 4 alleles has a 5090% chance of developing AD by age 85. To track the expression pattern of apoE in brain, Xu et al. created EGFP apoE reporter mice by expressing enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) on one apoE allele and leaving the other allele functi...Researchers find protein that silences genes
...me genes are selectively silenced and how silenced alleles can be turned on again may someday have practical benefits. For instance, tumor suppressor genes that normally help keep cells from dividing uncontrollably are often silenced by DNA methylation and histone modifications in cancer cells, contributing...New discovery: Molecular variation in one gene affects the growth of natural populations
...ation growth. How strongly the differences in Pgi alleles affect population growth depends on ecological factors. The size of the habitat patch and its connectivity to existing populations affect migration and gene flow between populations. The study shows that genetic factors and the structure of the hab...Environmental effects on genetic adaptation and population dynamics
...gi gene has several forms, or alleles; The f and d alleles are most common--previously, butterflies with eith...nces in maturation and egg laying. Females with f alleles mature quickly and lay more eggs early on, just the strategy for exploiting a small patch, from whic...Researchers identify OCD risk gene
...uence on SERT expression. "The gain-of-function L alleles appear to inhibit connections between emotion and repetitive behaviors and such executive brain functions as task-switching," Goldman said. "These neurobiology relationships should be further tested in combined genetic-neuroimaging studies."...U-M scientists identify major psoriasis susceptibility gene
...lled haplotype mapping. Haplotypes are clusters of alleles that tend to be inherited together as a group, because they are located close to each other on the same chromosome. This means that small individual variations in DNA, which originated in a distant ancestor, are often passed intact from generation to...Inefficient immune killer cells abet HIV infection
...e in fighting infection--that specific HLA class I alleles are associated with delayed AIDS onset, yet infected cell death rates are not reduced in patients with advanced disease (which suggests that an impaired CTL response does not underlie disease progression). It may be that the modest contributions of t...News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
...ng neuropathy Djrine-Sottas syndrome). Both mutant alleles caused a demyelinating neuropathydespite the coexistence of normal alleles, consistent with a gain of function mechanism. S63C caused a packing defect in the myelin, whereas S63C was retained in theendoplasmic reticulum and elicited a presumably toxi...Key heart and Alzheimer's disease protein imaged for first time in native state
...arent, Weisgraber explains. As the number of apoE4 alleles increases from 0 to 2, the risk of AD increases from 20 to 90 percent, and the typical age of onset decreases from 84 years to 68 years. The presence of one apoE4 allele results in an estimated 45 percent chance of developing Alzheimer's by 85 years ......tients without the EGFR*1 haplotype on one or more alleles (actual nucleotide sequence of a gene on a chromosome) (35 percent versus 15 percent). A subset analysis was conducted in 139 patients with good performance status (PS 0 or 1). After adjusting for the effects of known prognostic factors that were ...Flipped genetic sequences illuminate human evolution and disease
...es, the scientists found three inversions with two alleles or pairs of genes displaying the human inversion i...e bomb in genetic terms, Scherer said, since these alleles may improperly align and recombine during replication, ultimately causing DNA deletions or a loss of...Study demonstrates how gene variant may contribute to cancer development
...is one of the first candidate tumor susceptibility alleles (DNA codings of the same gene) that is found in a large proportion of the general population (13.7 percent) and significantly increases cancer risk by approximately 24 percent. How TGFBR1*6A contributes to cancer development is largely unknown. Bori...The genetic origins of corn on the cob
...pect that as the ear got larger, it needed special alleles of ramosa1 to prevent the extra rows from forming branches instead of kernels," says Martienssen. "There may have been other reasons for selecting an unbranched ear, including the interaction with other genes that were subsequently lost during domest...Gene variant linked to chronic kidney disease
... investigation of the role Apolipoprotein E (APOE) alleles play in chronic kidney disease. APOE is known to b...tudies have suggested that the e2 increased and e4 alleles decreased the risk of kidney disease, but those studies mostly focused on individuals with diabetes....Readers of genome decipher signatures of cancer patient outcomes
... MTHFR was that the combination of the two variant alleles was associated with significantly reduced risks of...id, or vitamin B9, metabolic pathway. The variant alleles of both SNPs result in reduced MTHFR enzymatic activity. Reduced MTHFR activity increases the amoun...NSAID drug protects against intestinal tumors in mice, despite poor diet and gene losses
...of the p27 gene was lost, and 93 percent when both alleles of the p27 gene were lost. But all of the knock-out mice variants developed tumors in both their small and large intestines when fed a Western-style diet. "This showed that the diet overwhelmed any protective effect the p27 genes conferred," says Ya...Fox Chase Cancer Center researchers look for 'silenced' genes to monitor kidney cancer patients
...an find one methylated gene among 100 unmethylated alleles (genes at the same site on a specific chromosome). "This specificity is enough to detect even a few cancer cells among healthy cells," explained molecular biologist Paul Cairns, Ph.D., lead researcher of the study. In an earlier Fox Chase study with ...Histamine, anxiety and alcoholism
...ow us to compare the distribution of genotypes and alleles between the alcoholic and nonalcoholic groups. Finally, since the populations are independent, meaning genetically distinct, we assumed that if any association with alcoholism and harm avoidance were to be found in the same direction in both populat...Individual taste receptor variations determine 'classic' PTC bitterness perception
...s that the taste-receptor genes and their multiple alleles play a dominant role in determining how we perceiv...he compounds, the researchers introduced different alleles of the gene into cultured cells, which then expressed the corresponding taste receptor protein. A s...Map of human genetic variation across populations may promise improved disease treatments
...is related to the distance between two variants or alleles of one gene in a single person. The further the distance between two gene variants, Jasny explained, the greater the odds that one variant may be recombined or shuffled out of the sequence block as DNA moves from parent to child. Conversely, if the v...