Archive for the ‘genetics’ category: Page 386
Feb 1, 2019
New U.S. Experiments Aim To Create Gene-Edited Human Embryos
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics, health
Feb 1, 2019
Exploring the dark side of the genome
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, supercomputing
Dr. Rico explained: “When we compare human genomes from different people, we see that they are way more different than we initially expected when the Human Genome Project was declared to be ”completed” in 2003. One of the main contributions to these differences are the so called Copy Number Variable (CNV) regions. CNV regions are in different copy number depending on each individual, and their variability can be greater in some human populations than others. The number of copies of CNV regions can contribute to both normal phenotypic variability in the populations and susceptibility to certain diseases.
Research has shown a direct relationship between mutations in introns and variability in human populations.
One of the greatest challenges of genomics is to reveal what role the ”dark side” of the human genome plays: those regions where it has not yet been possible to find specific functions. The role that introns play within that immense part of the genome is especially mysterious. The introns, which represent almost half the size of the human genome, are constitutive parts of genes that alternate with regions that code for proteins, called exons.
Jan 31, 2019
An amazing panel with Aubrey de Grey, Judy Campisi, and Nir Barzilai
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: genetics, life extension
Click on photo to start video.
Hosted by John Lewis of Oisin. Panel title: “A Therapeutic Revolution Against Aging”.
Aubrey de Grey, Judy Campisi, Nir Barzilai in a panel titled “A Therapeutic Revolution Against Aging”. Hosted by John Lewis of Oisin.
Continue reading “An amazing panel with Aubrey de Grey, Judy Campisi, and Nir Barzilai” »
Jan 31, 2019
New Aging Clock Could Predict Your Future Lifespan
Posted by Steve Hill in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension
A new aging clock developed by Professor Steve Horvath and his research team takes measuring your biological age a step further and can accurately predict your future lifespan.
The epigenetic clock
As we age, our DNA experiences chemical changes called DNA methylation (DNAm); these changes are used as a way to measure age and are the basis of the epigenetic clock. As we age, the methylation patterns present on our DNA change, and researchers can measure these changes to work out how old an animal or person is.
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Jan 31, 2019
Genetic Tests for Autism Can Sometimes Change Lives
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: genetics, neuroscience
The assays don’t always yield results, but the information they offer can, at times, alter the course of treatment or prevention.
- By Jessica Wright, Spectrum on January 31, 2019
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Jan 30, 2019
Gene-editing tool CRISPR repurposed to develop better antibiotics
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: biotech/medical, genetics
A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher and his collaborators at the University of California, San Francisco have repurposed the gene-editing tool CRISPR to study which genes are targeted by particular antibiotics, providing clues on how to improve existing antibiotics or develop new ones.
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Jan 30, 2019
Hundreds of genes affecting tobacco and alcohol use discovered
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: biotech/medical, genetics
Tobacco and alcohol use, both genetically inheritable behaviors, influence risk for many complex diseases and disorders and are leading causes of mortality.
The University of Minnesota was part of a research collaboration that conducted the first study, recently published in Nature Genetics, to identify hundreds of genomic locations associated with addictive behaviors. Researchers found more than 500 genetic variants that affect the use of and addiction to tobacco and alcohol. Until now, only a few of such variants had been identified.
Researchers studied 1.2 million people and looked five characteristics including the age when a participant began smoking; the number of cigarettes per day the participant smoked; whether the participant has ever been a regular smoker; whether the participant ever quit smoking; and the number of alcoholic drinks the participant had per week.
Continue reading “Hundreds of genes affecting tobacco and alcohol use discovered” »
Jan 30, 2019
Treating Disease
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, health
Jan 30, 2019
How Long Will We Live in 2069?
Posted by Lilia Lens-Pechakova in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension, neuroscience
A new, very good article on aging, modern aging research and its history, RAAD feest and other initiatives, on model organisms, genetics and future lifespans. “… In early December 2018, just a few months after RAADfest, I visited the Buck Institute for a daylong symposium titled “Live Better Longer: A Celebration of 30 Years of Research on Aging.” That wasn’t an arbitrary demarcation: Aging is one of the rare areas of modern science with a specific launch date. In this case, it was January 1988, when Tom Johnson, a behavioral geneticist at the University of California, Irvine, published a paper that linked a genetic mutation he named “age-1” to longer lifespans in a transparent, microscopic, mostly hermaphroditic roundworm known in scientific circles as C. elegans. Prior to Johnson’s discovery, aging had not received a lot of attention from researchers. In the 1820s, Benjamin Gompertz, a self-trained mathematician, concluded that humans don’t start to break down at some magic age but are constantly declining and losing the ability to repair themselves, a concept now referred to as the Gompertz law of mortality. The first hint that there might be a cellular mechanism underlying the aging process came more than a century later, in the 1930s, when two Cornell scientists discovered that rats kept on calorically restricted diets lived significantly longer than their more satiated brethren. But overall, the field was mostly known as being a haven for charlatans and quacks peddling immortality elixirs and other magical cures — a reputation that continued even after Johnson’s work was published…In 1993, Cynthia Kenyon, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered that mutations on a different gene, called daf-2, caused C. elegans to live twice as long as expected. Several years later, Gary Ruvkun, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, showed that these so-called worm-aging genes were closely related to genes in the insulin-signaling system of humans. Around the same time, MIT’s Guarente and some of his colleagues discovered the first of several genes in yeast — which are also present in humans — linked to dramatically extended lifespan…” https://medium.com/s/2069/how-long-will-we-live-in-2069-f03e698f6de2
With this promising research on the horizon, how long might humans live in the future? Fantastical claims to longevity have existed since the dawn of recorded time, but reliable data about maximum human lifespan only dates to the mid-1950s, when the Guinness Book of World Records began independently verifying claims. Even then, initially corroborated ages can end up disproven: On December 27, Russian researchers published a paper arguing that the current world record holder, a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment, who said she was 122 when she died in 1997, had stolen her mother’s identity and was actually 99 at the time.
Assuming Calment wasn’t a fraud, since 1955, 46 people have made it to age 115. Nine of them have made it to 117 — and only two, Calment and an American woman named Sarah Knauss, have made it past 117. (Knauss died in 1999 at age 119). Over that same time frame, just under 11 billion people have been alive. That means roughly .0000004204133 percent of people have made it to 115. You’re 79,333 times more likely to get hit by lightning than you are to live to 115; 22,455 times more likely to end up in the emergency room from a golf cart accident; and 11,817 times more likely to get murdered.
