EurekAlert! InContext Modules

Public Release: 30-Oct-2012
NCH partners with Silicon Valley to market high-end diagnostic and medical research software
Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and Transformatix Technologies, Inc., in Davis, California, have partnered to create BioLinQ, a new biomedical informatics company designed to supply advanced software solutions for disease diagnosis and medical research.

Public Release: 26-Oct-2012
New grant to establish pan-continental bioinformatics research network in Africa
Victor Jongeneel, director of the High-Performance Biological Computing program and affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, is a key participant in a grant awarded by the Human Heredity and Health in Africa Initiative, or H3Africa, to establish a pan-continental bioinformatics network to aid research.

Human Heredity and Health in Africa Initiative

Public Release: 25-Oct-2012
Tracking environmental causes of good and bad health
A Simon Fraser University scientist working at one of Canada's first epigenomics mapping centres says new federal funding will accelerate researchers' ability to unravel how we develop some of the most common life threatening cancers. Through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a granting agency that funds research, the federal government in partnership with Genome BC and Génome Québec is injecting $12 million into epigenetic research.

Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Genome BC, Génome Québec

Public Release: 25-Oct-2012

Scientific Reports
Scientists deepen genetic understanding of MS
Five scientists, including two from Simon Fraser University, have discovered that 30 percent of our likelihood of developing Multiple Sclerosis can be explained by 475,806 genetic variants in our genome. Genome-wide Association Studies commonly screen these variants, looking for genetic links to diseases. They have just had their findings published online in Scientific Reports. It's a sub-publication of the journal Nature.

Public Release: 25-Oct-2012

Science Translational Medicine
Academia should fulfill social contract by supporting bioscience startups, case study says
Universities not only provide the ideal petri dish for cultivating bioscience with commercial potential, but have a moral obligation to do so, given the opportunity to translate public funding into health and jobs, according to a new case study by UCSF researchers.

Public Release: 25-Oct-2012

Frontiers in Genetics
New genomics study shows ancestry could help solve disease riddles
A new study by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute, Scripps Health, and Scripps Translational Science Institute reveals that by comparing the genomes of diseased patients with the genomes of people with sufficiently similar ancestries could dramatically simplify searches for harmful mutations, opening new treatment possibilities.

National Institutes of Health, Stand Up to Cancer Foundation, Price Foundation, Scripps Genomic Medicine

Public Release: 25-Oct-2012
Peer review option proposed for biodiversity data
Data publishers should have the option of submitting their biodiversity datasets for peer review, according to a discussion paper commissioned by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The proposal is among a set of recommendations made by Mark Costello and co-authors in the paper Quality assurance and Intellectual Property Rights in advancing biodiversity data publication, freely available for download through the GBIF Online Resource Centre.

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

ACS Synthetic Biology
Training your robot the PaR-PaR way
PaR-PaR, a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language developed by researchers at JBEI and Berkeley Lab, uses an object-oriented approach to make it easier to integrate robotic equipment into biological laboratories. Effective robots can increase research productivity, lower costs and provide more reliable and reproducible experimental data.

US Department of Energy/Office of Science

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

PLOS Biology
Neuroscientists propose revolutionary DNA-based approach to map wiring of whole brain
A team of neuroscientists has proposed a new and potentially revolutionary way of obtaining a neuronal connectivity map (the "connectome") of the whole brain of the mouse.

Public Release: 22-Oct-2012
Researchers launch innovative, hands-on online tool for science education
Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego and at St. Petersburg Academic University in Russia, have developed a one-of-a-kind, hands-on online learning tool that weaves together for the first time science and programming education--and automatically grades homework too.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Russian Ministry of Science and Education

Public Release: 22-Oct-2012

British Journal of Nutrition
Kittens: Their microbiomes are what they eat
For animals as well as people, diet affects what grows in the gut. The gut microbial colonies, also known as the gut microbiome, begin to form at birth. Their composition affects how the immune system develops and is linked to the later onset of metabolic diseases such as obesity. Common wisdom is that cats, by nature carnivorous, are healthiest when fed high-protein diets. Researchers at the University of Illinois wanted to find out if this is true.

Public Release: 21-Oct-2012

Nature
Danish researchers release ground-breaking knowledge about calcium pumps in cells
Researchers from the Danish National Research Foundation's PUMPkin Centre at both the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University have now shown that calcium pumps in the cell's outer membrane adjust the pump speed very accurately to the calcium concentration. These findings have just been published in the prestigious journal Nature.

Public Release: 21-Oct-2012

Nature
Researchers discover turbo switch of calcium pump in biological cells
A Danish-British research team has discovered a turbo switch in the vital calcium pump in our body's cells. In studies at the X-ray source DORIS at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotorn DESY in Hamburg and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility ESRF in Grenoble the team discovered that the on-off switch of the pump has a previously unknown third position, which switches the pump into a turbo gear.

Public Release: 18-Oct-2012

Nature Genetics
A*Star scientists identify mutation that causes skin hyperproliferation
Scientists have identified a mutation in a gene that causes patches of very thick skin to appear on the palms and soles of affected people. This skin disorder is related, albeit in a much milder form, to that of the Indonesian "Tree Man", Dede Koswara.

Agency for Science Technology and Research

Public Release: 17-Oct-2012
From form to function: 2013 DOE JGI Community Sequencing Program portfolio announced
For genomics researchers, the term "form to function" could be applied to the ongoing transition from not just studying an organism's genetic code to also understanding the roles those genes play. All the projects selected for the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute's 2013 Community Sequencing Program portfolio combine sequence data generation with large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to enable fuller functional genome annotation.

US Department of Energy Office of Science

Public Release: 16-Oct-2012
Bioengineers lead NIH center to map the gene activities of individual cells in human cortex
Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have received a $9.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a single-cell genomics center and develop a three-dimensional map of gene activities in individual cells in the human cortex. Researchers believe understanding variations between individual cells within the same tissue may be critical to understanding the origins of diseases, including brain disorders.

NIH Common Fund

Public Release: 15-Oct-2012
NIH Common Fund announces awards for Single Cell Analysis Program
The National Institutes of Health plans to invest more than $90 million over five years, contingent upon the availability of funds, to accelerate the development and application of single cell analysis across a variety of fields. The goal is to understand what makes individual cells unique and to pave the way for medical treatments that are based on disease mechanisms at the cellular level.

NIH Common Fund

Public Release: 15-Oct-2012

PLOS Genetics
23andMe compares family history and genetic tests for predicting complex disease risk
A 23andMe mathematical model shows family history and genetic tests offer different strengths, suggesting combined family history and genetics improve disease risk prediction, as published online in PLOS Genetics. Family history is most useful in assessing risks for highly common, heritable conditions (i.e., coronary artery disease), but substantially less predictive than genetic factors for diseases with moderate or low frequency (i.e., Crohn's Disease) where SNP-based genetic tests provide potentially valuable evidence in differential diagnoses.

23andMe

Public Release: 15-Oct-2012

Science
Strengthening a billion-dollar gene in soybeans
Soybean cyst nematode does hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of damage each year. Crop sciences researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin think they may have found a way to strengthen plant resistance.

Soybean Disease Biotech Research Center at the University of Illinois

Public Release: 12-Oct-2012

Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
Blood cells may offer telltale clues in cancer diagnosis
Researchers from Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine and colleagues probe the potential use of blood cell variation as a diagnostic, predictive, and research tool in cancer biology.

National Institutes of Health, Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute

Public Release: 11-Oct-2012

Genome Research
In the bacterial world of your mouth, nurture wins out over nature
The human mouth is home to a teeming community of microbes, yet still relatively little is known about what determines the specific types of microorganisms that live there. Is it your genes that decide who lives in the microbial village, or is it your environment? In a study published online in Genome Research, researchers have shown that environment plays a much larger role in determining oral microbiota than expected.

National Institutes of Health

Public Release: 11-Oct-2012

BioScience
Techniques used to infer pathways of protein evolution found unreliable
Biologists have published thousands of papers that used statistical techniques to infer the likely evolutionary paths that led to the present-day forms of proteins. But careful experimental studies of the properties of reconstructed ancestral forms of visual pigments and variants created by mutation suggest that core simplifying assumptions used in the statistical approaches are unreliable and make the approaches unable to identify the actual paths.

National Institutes of Health, Emory University

Public Release: 10-Oct-2012

PLOS ONE
First WGS of multiple pancreatic cancer patients outlined in study by TGen, Mayo and SHC
Whole genome sequencing -- spelling all 3 billion letters in the human genome -- "is an obvious and powerful method for advancing our understanding of pancreatic cancer," according to a new study from TGen, Mayo Clinic and Scottsdale Healthcare. The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) demonstrated that WGS "represents a compelling solution to obtaining detailed molecular information on tumor biopsies in order to provide guidance for therapeutic selection," concluded the study published today by PLOS ONE.

National Foundation for Cancer Research, Randy Pausch Scholarship Fund, Seena Magowitz Foundation

Public Release: 9-Oct-2012

Nature Biotechnology
USC develops software to facilitate large-scale biological inquiry
The world's leading mass spectrometer manufacturers have agreed to license technology that enabled University of Southern California researchers to develop software that, for the first time, allows scientists to easily use and share research data collected across proprietary platforms.

Wunderkinder Foundation, Redstone Family Foundation, NIH/National Cancer Institute

Public Release: 9-Oct-2012

Health Affairs
Hospitals that cooperate on infection control fare better than hospitals acting alone
An individual hospital's infection control efforts have a ripple effect on the prevalence of a deadly and highly infectious bacterium in hospitals throughout its surrounding region, a multi-center research group led by the University of Pittsburgh demonstrated in a computer simulation-based study.

NIH/National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Pennsylvania Department of Health


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