Genome sequencing is enabling new insights into the genetic aspects of health and disease that have touched just about every aspect in biomedicine. It is also, like the “skin”-colored crayons of yore, disproportionately focused on the Caucasian segment of the population. And that is a loss for everyone.
LONDON – Twenty years on from sequencing of the first draft of the human genome and the associated hype, 2019 was the year that the science of genomics truly began to make an impact in health care.
In the Dec. 20, 2019, issue of Science, Stefan Kaufmann, who is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and his colleagues report that the immune system could calibrate its response to Pseudomonas aeruginosa by monitoring the bacterial quorum sensing chatter.
A single injection of SOD1-targeting RNA into the subpial space, which is below the innermost meningeal layer, was able to spread throughout the spinal cord and, via retrograde delivery, into brain centers that project to the spinal cord in several animal models, including primates.
“Bacteria often only do harm at certain concentrations,” Stefan Kaufmann told BioWorld. In fact, bacteria have evolved an entire communication system, so-called quorum sensing, to monitor how many of their colleagues are in the vicinity, and then switch from growth to virulence only at high densities.?
Scientists at the University of Tuebingen have identified a network of antifibrotic RNAs, and showed that this network was controlled by the transcription factor Pparg. Fibrosis, which is essentially the formation of inappropriate scar tissue, contributes to multiple diseases, and its molecular mechanisms are poorly understood.
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