Monthly Archives: June 2017

Air pollution (PM2.5 particles) — Are they REALLY “killing thousands in the U.S.”, or should the concern of these deaths be focused on highly polluted countries such as China, India and Africa?

Posted on June 29, 2017 by DWN

“PM2.5” is the abbreviation for “Particulate Matter, 2.5 micrometers or less”. PM2.5 particles are air-pollutant particles having a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less –– i.e. small enough to invade even the smallest airways of the human lung. In the … Continue reading →

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More Millennials Are Having Strokes

Posted on June 28, 2017 by DWN

A Scientific American analysis finds this trend differs based on where one lives By Dina Fine Maron June 28, 2017 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-millennials-are-having-strokes/

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Rare cell variability and drug-induced reprgramming: A mode of cancer drug Rx resistance

Posted on June 27, 2017 by DWN

A major problem in treating a cancer, after it has developed, is that tumor cells (just like bacteria) often exhibit a high rate of mutation –– which serves as a means of survival. Thus, a new cancer drug is given, … Continue reading →

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α-Synuclein in gut endocrine cells and its implications for Parkinson’s disease

Posted on June 20, 2017 by DWN

Parkinson disease (PD) is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease characterized by motor disturbances –– including resting “pill-rolling” tremor, cogwheel rigidity, and slow movements, as well as gastrointestinal symptoms, such as constipation and gastroparesis (decreased ability of stomach to move food to … Continue reading →

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Finding useful data across multiple biomedical data repositores, using DataMed

Posted on June 19, 2017 by DWN

Biomedical research has always been a data-intensive endeavor, leading (more than a decade ago) to the entire field of Bioinformatics. However, the amount of informa­tion was much more manageable just a decade ago. Today’s researchers not only have to stay … Continue reading →

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MARRVEL: Integration of human and model organism genetic resources to facilitate functional annotation of the human genome

Posted on June 19, 2017 by DWN

This article [attached] is a follow-up on today’s theme of “Bioinformatics.” One major challenge encountered with interpreting human genetic variants is our limited understanding of the functional impact of genetic alterations on biological processes. Traditional variant interpretation methodology relies on … Continue reading →

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Large-scale identification of common trait and disease variants affecting gene expression

Posted on June 19, 2017 by DWN

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified innumerable genetic loci involved with traits and diseases. Yet –– it is usually unclear which gene (whether it be the one closest to the variant or one further away) is affected in such loci … Continue reading →

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Zygote gene activation (ZGA): Starting the embryo’s own transcription for the first time in the fertilized egg

Posted on June 16, 2017 by DWN

In mammals, after fertilization of the egg, what happens during the earliest minutes in the fertilized egg (zygote) has been a big black box before the 1990s. First it was found that maternal transcription in the fertilized oocyte is operational. … Continue reading →

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Transgenerational inheritance of chromatin states, … and relevance to lengths of giraffes’ necks

Posted on June 15, 2017 by DWN

As we have often discussed in GEITP emails, epigenetics represents “effects beyond DNA sequence (nucleotide changes) that result in an impact on phenotype.” It appears that most, if not all DNA-mutation-caused traits are also affected/modified to some degree by epigenetics … Continue reading →

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Genomic analyses identify hundreds of variants associated with age at menarche and support a role for male and female puberty timing in cancer risk

Posted on June 12, 2017 by DWN

The attached article describes an excellent example of what today’s genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are able to do –– finding genetic loci (throughout the genome) that are statistically significantly associated with very complicated multifactorial traits. In this case, the very … Continue reading →

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