http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. (Medical Xpress)—As anyone familiar with the X-Men knows, mutants can be either very good or very bad—or somewhere in between. The same appears true within cancer cells, which may harbor hundreds of mutations that set them apart from other cells in the body; the scientific challenge has been to figure out which mutations are culprits and which are innocent bystanders. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have devised a novel approach to sorting them out: they generated random mutations in a gene associated with lymphoma, tested the proteins produced by the genes to see how they performed, and generated a catalog of mutants with cancer-causing potential. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-technique-lymphoma-linked-genetic-variations.html Cancer Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:14:18 EST news275836453 By using a model, researchers at the University of Montreal have identified and "switched off" a chemical chain that causes neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and dementia. The findings could one day be of particular therapeutic benefit to Huntington's disease patients. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-chemical-neurodegenerative-diseases.html Neuroscience Tue, 27 Nov 2012 04:50:39 EST news273214228