A new resource from the Gene Ontology Consortium, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the known functions of all protein-coding human genes, has just been completed and released on a new website. For the first time, researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and other institutions used large-scale evolutionary modeling to integrate data on human genes with genetic data collected from other organisms. This has culminated in a searchable public resource that lists the known functions of more than 20,000 genes using the most accurate and complete evidence available. A paper describing the resource was just published in the journal Nature. The new resource of gene function descriptions, called the “PAN-GO functionome,” will essentially be used in the same way by the scientific community—to analyze omics data among other applications—but it will yield more accurate results. That’s because the recent work has brought together all the information in the knowledge base using large-scale evolutionary models (which track the evolutionary history of thousands of genes and related proteins), creating a more complete and accurate picture of gene function. 

Our organs age at different rates, and a blood test determining how much they’ve each aged could predict the risk of conditions like lung cancer and heart disease decades later, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

Lowering the body temperature of preterm infants (born at 33 to 35 weeks of pregnancy) with hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE)—a type of brain damage caused by oxygen loss—offers no benefits over standard care, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Previous studies of near-term and term infants (born after 36 weeks) with HIE found that this cooling treatment, which lowers body temperature to about 92 degrees Fahrenheit, significantly reduced the risk of death or disability by age 18 months (corrected for prematurity). However, the current findings show that such benefits are not observed for preterm infants with HIE. The authors noted that use of the cooling treatment in preterm infants has increased, despite little research on its effectiveness in this age group.