Most people tend to think of gene editing as a way to repair faulty genes. But a team from the University of Minnesota has gained new scientific insights into prostate cancer by taking the opposite tack.
The 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.”
The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Sudhof “for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.”
Scientists have developed a method for rapidly profiling the epigenetic state of the entire genome, an advance which opens the door to new insights into which parts of a cell’s DNA are ready to be put to work at any given moment.
The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Sudhof “for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.”
An American-British team has developed a method for assessing how important mutations in specific noncoding regions of the genome are likely to be, and used it to look at nearly 100 cancer genomes to identify likely driver mutations in noncoding locations.
By using modern sequencing methods to look at two strains of rats that either prefer or abhor alcohol, researchers have identified a glutamate receptor that has an early stop codon and so is for all intents and purposes missing in the drinkers.
Figuring out the contribution of any gene to complex disorders is a murky fishing expedition, done in waters muddied by the interaction of the gene in question with other genes and environmental influences. As a result, identifying genetic contributions to complex disorders has been slow going even when very large groups have been sequenced.
