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Genetics news

Medical research

U.S. duo wins Nobel Prize in medicine for discovery of microRNA and gene regulation breakthrough

US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for their discovery of microRNA and its role in how genes are regulated, solving a decades-old mystery, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's ...

Genetics

A histone post-translational modification linked to lifelong susceptibility to stress in mice

Chemical changes to histones, the proteins that help to pack and organize DNA inside cells, play a key role in determining what genes will be consistently activated over the course of an animal or human's life. Past studies ...

Oncology & Cancer

Gene activation linked to severity of a rare lung cancer

Pulmonary carcinoids are rare tumors of the lung with extremely different clinical courses. In many patients, they behave like benign tumors; surgical removal of the tumor leads to a complete cure. However, some patients ...

Oncology & Cancer

Categorizing the epigenetic hallmarks that define cancer

Cancer mortality has just surpassed cardiovascular disease for the first time ever and one in two men, and one in three women, will be diagnosed with some form of the disease in the US, according to the NIH.

Genetics

Contrary to the common view, cerebral palsy can be genetic

Cerebral palsy, a non-progressing motor impairment that begins in early childhood, has widely been viewed as the result of oxygen deprivation during birth or other birth-related factors such as prematurity. While this is ...

Genetics

Gene therapy for the treatment of Huntington's disease

Gene therapy targeting the messenger RNA (mRNA) of the mutated huntingtin gene (HTT) can provide long-lasting therapeutic benefit in Huntington's disease after a single administration. An adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene ...

Genetics

Silencing a faulty gene may uncover clues to rare forms of ALS

Using an experimental drug, researchers have been able to suppress a mutated amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) gene. Studies in mice demonstrate that the therapy could show promise in treating rare, aggressive forms of ...

Genetics

Gene variant that protects against COVID-19 identified

An international metastudy led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet has identified a specific gene variant that protects against severe COVID-19 infection. The researchers managed to pinpoint the variant by studying people ...

Medical research

New cloud-based platform opens genomics data to all

Harnessing the power of genomics to find risk factors for major diseases or search for relatives relies on the costly and time-consuming ability to analyze huge numbers of genomes. A team co-led by a Johns Hopkins University ...

Oncology & Cancer

New opportunities for targeting overactive cancer genes

Anita Göndör's group has identified a new mechanism underlying the pathological over-expression of cancer genes. The results, which are published in Nature Communications show that signals in the environment of the cancer ...