Studies of obese children reveal body-weight control hormone
...hat obese children are more likely to carry a rare variant of so-called -melanocyte-stimulating hormone (-MSH...e early-onset obesity. The group found an abnormal variant of -MSH in five of the children studied. Further investigation demonstrated that the aberrant gene w...Plant enzyme efficiency may hold key to global warming
...r decades, scientists have struggled to engineer a variant of the enzyme that would more quickly convert carbon dioxide. Their attempts primarily focused on mutating specific amino acids within RuBisCO, and then seeing if the change affected carbon dioxide conver-sion. Because of RuBisCOs structural compl...Large European study finds gene variant is no strong risk factor for osteoporosis
...tic studies had found an association between the T variant and low bone mineral density (BMD) and fractures, ...to suggest that genetic testing of people for this variant could help in assessing fracture risk. The GENOMOS study was done to evaluate how good the COL1A1 ge...Tips from the journals of the American Society for Microbiology
...being investigated. Since its discovery, this new variant now referred to as Hunter virus, has been associat... 2006. Emergence of a new norovirus genotype II.4 variant associated with global outbreaks of gastroenteritis. Journal of Clinical Microbiology, 44. 2: 327-3...Taste gene may play role in smoking
...that smokers with a different, less common genetic variant for taste were the least likely to smoke. "Nicotine dependence is likely to be the result of many genes and complex environmental effects," said Dale Cannon with the University of Utah, lead author of the study. "What this study tells us is that gen...Study of Latina women and children finds large variation in susceptibility to pesticides
...ople with the QQ genotype have two copies of the Q variant of the PON1 gene, producing a PON1 enzyme that is ...ople with the RR genotype have two copies of the R variant of the PON1 gene, producing a PON1 enzyme that is more resistant to chlorpyrifos and chlorpyrifos ox...New genetic discovery explains 74 percent cases of age-related macular degeneration
...-third (29 percent) of people with a Factor H risk variant had not been diagnosed with AMD. The investigators...against AMD, even if one carries a risk-increasing variant of Factor H, and vice versa. As described in Nature Genetics, the two genes explained nearly three o......enetically as well. The results showed that an SNP variant hardly appeared in the pottokas; on the other hand...ter the influence of outside breeds, the more this variant appeared. According to the data, in this case also, it is the pottoka that has had the least externa...Coffee consumption linked to increased risk of heart attack for persons with certain gene variation
...quicken caffeine metabolism. Carriers of the gene variant CYP1A2*1F allele are "slow" caffeine metabolizers, while individuals with the gene variant CYP1A2*1A allele are "rapid" caffeine metabolizers. Ahmed El-Sohemy, Ph.D., of the University of Tor...Inefficient immune killer cells abet HIV infection
...variants. (This means that it would take an escape variant about five months to outgrow and replace the wild-type population.) From these results, Asquith et al. estimated the rate of cell death induced by a single CTL response. Just 2% of infected cell death could be assigned to CTL responses to a singl...Aggression-related gene weakens brain's impulse control circuits
...f normal people, we were able to see how this gene variant biases the brain toward impulsive, aggressive beha...les have two copies, one of which will be of the H variant in most cases. Several previous studies had linked increased serotonin during development with viol...Moderate lifetime reductions in LDL cholesterol dramatically reduce risk of heart disease
...articipants (1.2 percent) who carried the PCSK 9 variant developed coronary heart disease during the ARIC study's 15 years of follow-up, compared with 9.7 percent of the participants without the variant. Among white participants, the more modest 15 percent reduction in LDL cholesterol correlated to a 50 pe...Researchers identify OCD risk gene
... (NIAAA) have identified a previously unknown gene variant that doubles an individual's risk for obsessive-co...y studied transmission and non-transmission of the variant in a Canadian population of 175 OCD parent-child trios (two healthy parents and a child with OCD) an...Researchers identify new childhood-onset epilepsy disorder and its genetic cause
...to chromosome 7 and identify a pathogenic sequence variant in the gene CNTNAP2, which codes for the CASPR2 protein. Although these patients were from an isolated population, we anticipate that CASPR2 mutations will be found in children from other populations with mental retardation, seizures, and autism." "P...New human retrovirus originated in mice
...ate cancer is tenuous at best. "First, the genetic variant we studied occurs in familial clusters that constitute only a very small sliver of prostate cancers," he said. "And secondly, there are many reasons to believe that the virus might not relate to prostate cancer." For example, he pointed out, analysi...New evidence questions the simple link between prion proteins and vCJD
... containing a large amount of the disease specific variant of the PrP protein and watched how it was taken up. They saw the abnormal PrP was rapidly taken up by finger-like projections called villi and passed in to the lymph. It was not, however, taken up by structures called Peyer's nodules, that are belie...Paper reports discovery of virus implicated in genetics of prostate cancer
...ally true in the case of prostate cancer because a variant on the viral-defense gene, RNASEL, has been implicated in 15% of prostate cancer cases. The newly discovered virus is closely related to virus associated with leukemia in mice. "We have made a very fascinating discovery never before seen in humans ...Molecular discoveries aim at advancing early diagnosis of cancers
... "tNOX is translated from a cancer-specific splice variant messenger RNA that is missing exon 4. Both the exo...cancerous diseases. "Because cells containing the variant tNOX message are shed into the serum, it is a useful pan-cancer marker for clinical metastatic disea...Inflammation and drugs to control this activity studied in a variety of tumors sites
... subgroup of individuals who had two copies of one variant showed a statistically significant reduction of nearly 70 percent in the risk for developing adenomas. Among the other individuals who did not have this genotype, regular use of ibuprofen had little effect on risk of colorectal adenomas. "Our data a...A large step forward in the fight against African sleeping sickness
...n. For some time now, scientists have known that a variant of ApoL-1 is not neutralized by Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense. This truncated ApoL-1 variant can help to overcome the parasite that infects our body, but only when it is present in very high co...