Daily Archives: August 14, 2021

California condor. Photo courtesy of San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

California condors have the starring role in one of the nations greatest conservation success stories, fruitfully returning to the wild after nearly going extinct in the 1980s. A team of researchers at UC San Francisco have recently sequenced the condor genome, shining light on the species history and opening the door to a better understanding of genomics in small populations, for the benefit of both condors and humans.

We're interested in the interplay between small population size, inbreeding, harmful genetic variation, and disease, said Jeff Wall, PhD, MS, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in UCSFs Institute for Human Genetics and senior author on the study. Were digging into this deeply because wed like to quantify the genomic consequences.

By sequencing the genome and comparing between individuals, the team discovered that a surprising amount of diversity still exists among condors, despite the current population of about 520 having arisen from only 22 individuals. This diversity shows that condors once had a population size on the order of tens of thousands and that the diversity that was built up in the past has been preserved. The findings appeared May 13 in Current Biology.

Thats a hopeful sign, said Jacqueline Robinson, PhD, a post-doctoral researcher in Walls lab and lead author on the study. It suggests that the condors can adapt to changing conditions, and bodes well for their success in the wild.

Jacqueline Robinson, PhD, examines a portion of the California condor genome. Photo by Noah Berger

Walls work aligns with the emerging field of conservation genomics, in which knowing the genome of a species opens the door to an array of conservation efforts. For example, captive condors with complementary genomes can be paired to enhance diversity and avoid the impacts of deleterious mutations. In wild populations, researchers may be able to track evolutionary genomic changes in the future by simply gathering feathers to obtain genetic samples.

In addition, he said, studying genomics across species with small populations helps conservationists elucidate the limits of efforts to reverse the process of extinction in endangered species.

But the real reason Wall is studying the genome of an endangered raptor is less about the ecological stakes and more about its potential to tell us something about our own population genetics.

We use many of the same methods to follow harmful genetic variation in condors as we do in humans, said Wall, who has also investigated population genomics in the threatened spotted owl and groups of primates, as well as in populations of Han Chinese and Aboriginal Australian groups. Theres a direct correlation between the research were doing on birds and on people.

The advantage of condors, said Wall, is that its possible to analyze differences between individuals in a larger proportion of the group and to follow genetic variation over generations. What we learn from that analysis can apply to both endangered species and humans.

By getting an idea of how prevalent inbreeding is in nature and its relation to levels of diversity, we get some perspective on how to look at the patterns we see in humans, Robinson said.

Understanding those patterns in humans is important, said Wall, because in large parts of the world, cultural and religious practices lead to closed groups of people who marry one another, even though they may be related.

We know those practices lead to increased incidence of disease, said Wall. Wed like to be able to put numbers to that, to identify the mutations causing these diseases and maybe be able to make predictions that can be beneficial to those people.

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Sequencing the Condor Genome for Insights into Human Diversity - UCSF News Services

Beth Pratt| Special to the Avalanche-Journal

Going through accumulated paper stuff, including copies of some feature articles as well as copies of columns, is a slow process.

Reawakened memories send me in remembrance of people and their stories, the part of the job I most enjoyed was listening and learning how amazing people really are at overcoming life's sometimes difficult surprises.

And I wonder, how could I forget this, that or the other? I am thinking not just of the newspaper career, but of other activities, ideas and challenges that loomed so important at the time.

Although the time frame would be somewhat different in the big cities, rural America's awakening tended to arrive after its sons (and sometimes daughters) left home to go to war during the 20th century.

Travel and cultural experiences also were influenced by the growing communications possibilities. Firstradio and then television brought the world closer together in one sense and sometimes further apart as cultures collided.

What is unique about today's culture is the speed with which it moves. In every environment, families are exposed to a vast flood of information and entertainment. The possibilities for knowledge seem endless.

Yet, a heavy sense of despair seems to grip much of the country as neighbor turns against neighbor.Imported, failed ideologies became popular among many of the so-called scholars of the day and the early 1960s university students were prime targets.

Now, our greatest inner-cities have become killing fields as a brazen lawlessness paralyzes the forces of legal restraint with bitter cries of hatred and blame.

The public good seems to have mostly turned into public bad in many areas of the country, still known in other parts of the world as a beacon of freedom even in its imperfections.

Some people blame all our troubles on politicians whichever side they choosebut they are wrong in that the voters make the choices for office.

What we really have is a spiritual crisis brought about by the same problems that have assailed the world's people groups from its beginning.

The issue? We are still trying to create God in our own image instead of letting God transform us into His image.

To his people, God says through the Prophet Isaiah, I will lay waste the mountains and hills and dry up all their vegetation; I will turn rivers into islands and dry up the pools...

"You have seen many things, but you pay no attention; your ears are open, but you do not listen. … So he poured on them his burning anger, the violence of war. ...but they did not take it to heart. (from Isaiah 42 NIV)

What we experience today is as ancient as time itself, but we seem to have lost interest in knowing and understanding what history can teach us.

Yet, we have astounding advancement today in science (I'm currently reading The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson about what science calls the code of life. It is a compelling story of scientific advance amid other wonders of our Digital Age.)

The story of genetic manipulation is enhanced by the 2012 publication of research that brought the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.

It opens a window on major researchers and their painstaking lab work. On the outside, warnings reverberate around the moral issue of making genetic code changes in human life. Rewriting the code of life to fight disease by changes to human genetics could be be opening a last frontier of human effort to make God in our own image.

From way before Isaiah's time until now, human history has shown itself to be repetitive.

Do not be deceived. God, who designed and set life on Earth in motion, will not be mocked according to the accumulated wisdom and prophesy of the ages.

Beth Pratt retired after 25 years as the religion editor of the Avalanche-Journal.

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Pratt: We seem to have lost interest in understanding what history can teach us - LubbockOnline.com

KU Leuven's Yves Moreau is pushing to have a 2017 Human Genetics paper that he suspects did not have the proper informed consent retracted, Science reports.

According to Science, the paper used data from the Y chromosome haplotype reference database (YHRD), which includes submissions from around the world. In June, Nature News reported that YHRD could include submissions obtained from Uyghurs in China and Roma in Europe who may have been unable to freely give informed consent and that while the database asks if informed consent was obtained, it does not check.

Moreau tells Science the Human Genetics paper from Chinese and German researchers is especially troubling due to the volume of data it includes as well as since the co-authors include members of Chinese law enforcement. Additionally, while the paper says established ethical principles were followed, co-author Michael Nothnagel from the Cologne Center for Genomics has since said, according to Science, that some data may have been obtained by approaches that did not meet relevant ethical standards.

Science adds that Springer Nature, the publisher of Human Genetics, is investigating the issue, but Moreau tells it the publisher is moving too slowly and that he has now written to the journal's editorial board. This approach, it notes, has led to resignations at other editorial boards Moreau has contacted about other papers he has identified for review.

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Pursuit of a Retraction | Genomeweb - GenomeWeb

Building on its commitment to genomic research and health care innovations, Avera Health will utilize Sema4s health intelligence platform to further advance cancer care

Avera Health, an integrated regional health care system that serves 300 locations across the Upper Midwest, and Sema4, a patient-centered health intelligence company, today announced a new collaboration launching a precision medicine initiative. This initiative will initially focus on advancing oncology care, enabling Avera Healths providers and patients to benefit from data-driven insights that inform targeted cancer treatments.

Avera Cancer Institute has had a robust precision oncology program for several years in which the patients tumor has been genetically sequenced to guide individualized cancer treatment. This collaboration will take that a step further by leveraging Centrellis, Sema4s health intelligence platform, to curate, structure and integrate clinical and genomic data to support both cancer research and clinical care at Avera Health. Sema4 will deliver predictive disease network models and clinically actionable insights, empowering Avera Healths providers to further improve the prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer for their patients. Sema4 will also offer digital tools, which give Avera Healths providers the ability to easily search for cohorts of patients based on clinical criteria, view a patients treatment history that is contained in the curated data as an interactive timeline, and more systematically match patients to clinical trials.

Avera Health has a longstanding commitment to genomics and personalized medicine, and a forward- thinking approach to understand the critical role it plays in generating better health outcomes, said John Lee, MD, FACS, Chief Medical Officer for Cancer Research at the Avera Cancer Institute. Our collaboration with Sema4, and the resulting access to curated and structured real-time oncology data, will allow our providers to leverage cutting-edge tools that will improve the delivery and quality of cancer care. This access to increasingly rich clinical data throughout the patient journey will also accelerate critical, lifesaving treatment options.

The collaboration between Avera Health and Sema4 significantly builds upon Avera Healths existing clinical genomic offerings, led by the Molecular and Experimental Medicine team, Avera Institute for Human Genetics, the Avera Cancer Research team, and its dedicated physicians and genetic counseling clinical team. Averas providers and researchers have worked tirelessly to develop and collaborate with like-minded partners on innovative clinical trials and strategies to provide the right drugs to each and every patient that entrusts us with their care, said Casey Williams, PharmD, Chief Scientific Officer for Cancer Research at Avera Health. In time, thousands of patients across our six cancer centers, 40 outreach sites, and 37 hospitals will have access to the insights and offerings generated from this collaboration.

Avera Health is an outstanding health system with a proven history of excellence and innovation in personalized care and research, said Michelle Zimmerman, JD, MBA, General Manager of Oncology Solutions and Emerging Markets at Sema4. We are pleased to use our deep expertise in artificial intelligence, data science, and genomic sequencing to further enable precision oncology care for Avera Healths patients. We look forward to a successful, wide-ranging collaboration advancing numerous clinical and research initiatives across the Avera Health system.

As part of their work together, Avera Health will also utilize Sema4s industry-leading, information-driven genomic solutions. More Avera patients will be able to receive genomic testing earlier in their disease timeline to help oncologists choose the best chemotherapy treatment regimens, based on the individuals genomic data and genetic mutations that have taken place within the tumor, and the individuals hereditary risks. They will have access to Sema4 Signal Whole Exome Sequencing (WES), Whole Transcriptome Sequencing (WTS), and Hereditary Cancer testing to provide clinically actionable information about a broad range of genomic variants across the tumor and germline.

Our collaboration with Avera Health will accelerate discoveries which help oncologists provide optimized care to individual cancer patients in real time, said William K. Oh, MD, Chief Medical Science Officer at Sema4. Avera Health shares our vision to use clinicogenomic data to improve patients lives.

About the Avera Health

The Avera Health system has over 19,000 employees and physicians, serving more than 300 locations and 100 communities in a five-state region. Our ministry, our people and our superior value distinguish Avera. We carry on the health care legacy of the Benedictine and Presentation Sisters, delivering care in an environment guided by our values of compassion, hospitality and stewardship. For more information about Avera, visit our website at Avera.org. Learn more in our newsroom.

About Sema4

Sema4 is a patient-centered health intelligence company dedicated to advancing healthcare through data-driven insights. Sema4 is transforming healthcare by applying AI and machine learning to multidimensional, longitudinal clinical and genomic data to build dynamic models of human health and defining optimal, individualized health trajectories. Centrellis, our innovative health intelligence platform, is enabling us to generate a more complete understanding of disease and wellness and to provide science-driven solutions to the most pressing medical needs. Sema4 believes that patients should be treated as partners, and that data should be shared for the benefit of all. For more information, please visit sema4.com and connect with Sema4 on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.

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Avera Health and Sema4 Announce Collaboration to Advance Precision Oncology Care - Avera Health

One-third of the members of the editorial board of a leading American medical journal has resigned in protest against the publication of several research papers that could help the Chinese regime in its persecution of minorities. According to a report by The Intercept, after a slew of research papers that can help racial profiling of minorities in China were published by the journal named Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, eight of the 25 editorial board members resigned in protest. The members protested after the management of the journal failed to take any action on the papers despite repeated complaints.

According to The Intercept, emails accessed by it shows that the editor-in-chief of the journal was slow in responding to several controversial papers related to Tibetans, Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in China. Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine is published by Wiley, a New Jersey based company, and the company also took a long time to respond to concerns about the papers published by the journal.

The papers under question were first flagged by Yves Moreau, a Professor of Engineering and a bioinformatician at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and according to The Intercept, he has been fighting a tireless campaign to get journals to retract troubling or unethical papers. He has been successful in getting an order of Kuwait govt overturned, which had called for compulsory DNA collection from all citizens.

He was studying the DNA profiling of the minorities done by the Chinese authorities. During such searches, he found 18 papers published by Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, which dealt with various genetic topics related to the people in China. Some analysed the genetic differences between ethnic groups, including the genetic gaps between the majority Han community and minorities like Tibetans and Hui Muslims, and some had relied on samples that Moreau suspects were collected without proper consent.

Many of the papers were related to forensic genetics, a problematic subject in the entire scientific community. It refers to the collection of DNA for forensic databases, which is used by the police in criminal investigations. But although in theory it should be used only to find suspect criminals, it has the potential to conduct racial profiling, a highly problematic area. Moreover, scientists also worry about collection of DNA sample from ethnic minorities without their consent, which is happening in China.

The Chinese government is already DNA from its male citizens to build a massive a national forensic DNA database. Reportedly, the Communist government aims to collect and store genetic profiles of around 70 million people, around 10% of the countrys male population. Apart from that, Chinese police also forcibly collecting DNA samples from ordinary citizens, including migrant workers, dissidents, and minority Uyghur Muslims.

Although the Chinese govt says it is being done to fight crimes, researchers dont believe that, they say it is a part of the government efforts to deepen social control. Although most western countries collect DNA sample of convicts, the collection of such samples from ordinary citizens have been described as unprecedented. Human Rights Activists say the only purpose of this genetic profiling is the oppression of ethnic minorities by the Chinese govt.

This concern is being raised because of the kind of data collected by the Chinese govt. They are cataloguing markers known as short tandem repeats (STRs), which are repeating regions of DNA that are specific to the Y chromosome found in men. These STRs are extremely similar between men in the same male lineage, which means, when the authorities nab a dissident man, they can track all his male relatives using the database, even if they are not identified as relatives in official documents.

Since 2019, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine has published several papers authored by Chinese authors on the topic of forensic genetics, which means they used samples collected by the police, many of which could be done without consent. Many of the papers listed institutions as co-authors which work closely with the police or receive funding from the police. One paper even lists the Public Security Bureau in Tibet as the co-author, which is the police agency in the region.

All these show that the research papers published by the American journal were effectively authored or sponsored by the Chinese govt.

After discovering the papers, Yves Moreau had written in March this year to Suzanne Hart, the journals editor-in-chief and deputy director at the medical genetics and genomic medicine training program with the U.S. National Institutes of Healths National Human Genome Research Institute. He noted that before 2019, the journal had published only two papers on forensic genetic studies from outside China, which shows that the Chinese govt has specifically identified the journal where the papers on forensic genetic studies of vulnerable Tibetan and Muslim minorities can be published.

However, although Suzanne Hart acknowledged the mail and promised to look into the matter, he received no update for months after that. As a result, he wrote to the entire Editorial Board in June, describing the concerns with the papers published by them. Many of the board members agreed with him for a probe in the matter, and many said that they were not even aware of the papers.

When the board members wrote to Hart, she said she will get back with further information on how the management intends to address this issue. But when no communication came from her for several weeks, the board members started to resign in protest. Ophir Klein, a board member and a pediatric medical geneticist at the University of California San Francisco said that he left the board as he was really concerned about the lack of communication.

However, not all editorial board members who question the paper have resigned, some have decided to stay on to push for scrutiny of the papers, including Joris Veltman, the dean of the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University Medical School in UK. After he wrote to the management escalating the issue, they responded that Wiley would begin an investigation immediately.

After that, the company released a statement saying that the Integrity in Publishing Group of the company was overseeing the matter. However, they informed that they are only contacting with the authors and the institutional review boards associated with the published papers to clarify the consent procedures undertaken for collecting the DNA samples.

Although the consent was a major issue, it was not the only one. The company kept silence on the much larger issue of use of scientific instruments in racial profiling and discrimination by authoritarian governments. Moreau said the focus on consent is too narrow, and the larger question is whether the journal should be publishing research on vulnerable minorities, some of which directly involves the authorities persecuting them.

The board members are saying that if the papers are determined to be unethical, at least they should be retracted.

This is not the first time that Wileyhas been accused of allying with China. In September 2000, the editor of another journal published by the company had resigned over the issue of freedom of speech. Prof David Curtis, from University College Londons Genetics Institute, had resigned as the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Human Genetics, after he was prevented from publishing an article which said that academic journals should boycott papers from China protesting against Chinas human rights violations in Xinjiang.

Wiley, and Lancet which also refused to published the article, had said that publication of the article could pose difficulties for their offices in China. Yves Moreau was one of the co-authors of the article.

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One-third of editorial board members of American medical journal resign over papers that could help China persecute its minorities: Details - OpIndia

TheHuman Genome Project,a large-scale international effort to determine the complete DNA sequence that defines the human body, took more than 12 years to complete and involved thousands of researchers.

Now,a similar effort is underway to map each of the trillions of cells in the human body.

The Human Cell Atlas(HCA) would be acomprehensive map of cells that has the potential to rapidly advance the understanding of human health and the diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of disease, according to Gary Bader,a computational biologist and professor at the University of Torontos Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and the department of molecular genetics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

This project will likely be larger than the Human Genome Project, and it requires a massive international effort. No single individual or institute could do this on their own, he says. Its multi-disciplinary in nature, and pulls in people from genomics and technology development, basic biology, clinical research, computational biology and ethics.

We encourage participation from all countries and relevant scientific communities.

Bader, who is on the organizing committee for HCA, is helping to co-ordinatea scientific meeting of the HCA from Aug. 25 to 27. The meeting will focus on human development and pediatrics, mapping the body from conception to adolescence. Medicine by Design is a lead sponsor of the meeting, along with theChan Zuckerberg Initiativeand others.

Bader says the August meeting will bring together groups of people who are working on critical questions about cell types and states during human development.

Were aiming to deliver a highly interactive meeting that will provide plenty of opportunities for virtual face-to-face interaction in breakout discussion sessions, Bader says. A silver lining of having the meeting online instead of in-person, as was originally planned, is that there are no space restrictions. It can be open to anyone who wants to attend. Also, there are no travel costs for attendees, and we are able to offer registration free of charge.

Session topics will include: understanding cellular decision-making during development;lineage tracing; clonal evolution; tagging and its applications;and developmental origins of health outcomes over a lifespan. There will also be a session on regenerative medicine, led byGuoji GuoandJason Rock, focusing on how developmental and pediatric single cell atlas data can shed light on tissue aging and repair processes.

Regenerative medicine uses stem cells to replace diseased tissues and organs, creating therapies in which cells are the biological product. Regenerative medicine can also mean triggering stem cells that are already present in the human body to repair damaged tissues or to modulate immune responses. Increasingly, regenerative medicine researchers are using a stem-cell lens to identify critical interactions or defects that prepare the ground for disease, paving the way for new approaches to preventing disease before it starts.

There is strong evidence that well have to really understand development to live up to regenerative medicines key aims, Bader says. There are questions we dont know the answer tofor example, why do children heal better than adults? These answers are essential for researchers who are developing stem cell therapies or ways to encourage self-repair in the body.

The HCA group is mapping 14 organ systems, each organized into its own bio network. For instance, the gut, heart and kidney each have their own bio network, comprisingresearchers that focus on that specific system. Bader is part of the liver bio network.

Bader, along with the Temerty Faculty of Medicine Associate ProfessorSonya MacParlandand ProfessorIan McGilvray a scientist,and surgeon and senior scientist, respectively,at University Health Network (UHN) are part of a Medicine by Design collaborative research team that, in 2018,created the firstmap of human liver cells at the molecular level. They are currently part of the large, Medicine by Design-funded team projectstudying how to harness the livers power to regenerate.

The liver map represents the first time a human organ has been charted at the single-cell level. It illuminated the basic biology of the liver in ways that could eventually increase the success of transplant surgery and enable powerful regenerative medicine treatments for liver disease such as regenerating the liver with stem cells.

This is a tool that can be used by researchers who are developing cells in the lab. For instance, a U of T and UHN teamrecently published work that showed they can develop functional blood vessel cells found in the liver. This drew on our liver map work, which provided a benchmark for those researchers to compare their cells with adult human liver cells, says Bader. HCA continues to expand this work for example in pediatricsand it will become a fundamental resource for regenerative medicine researchers.

Medicine by Design is sponsoring the HCA meeting in August because its an opportunity to engage with the international effort on human cell mapping, which creates new scientific collaborations for the Medicine by Design community.

Moreover, the HCA informs new directions in regenerative medicine research, says Michael Sefton, executive director of Medicine by Design and aUniversity Professorin the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and theInstitute of Biomedical Engineering.

This international event will connect fields and people that traditionally dont work together, says Sefton, whose lab is located at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. A massive collaborative undertaking is whats necessary to bring HCA to fruition, and Medicine by Design is proud to support this effort. We cant overstate how much the HCA project could advance and transform regenerative medicine.

Bader says in addition to the opportunities for scientific learning, the event could have other benefits for attendees.

One of the advantages to attending the HCA meeting is the opportunity to network and potentially find out about funding opportunities one might not be aware of otherwise. Its a great opportunity for researchers to connect beyond their local collaborations.

Funded by a $114-million grant from theCanada First Research Excellence Fund, Medicine by Design brings together more than 150 principal investigators at U of T and its partner hospitals to advance regenerative medicine discoveries.

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U of T's Medicine by Design helps unite international researchers working to map every human cell - News@UofT

Nearly 300 gene variations that influence the reproductive lifespan of women have been identified by scientists in a global research collaboration.

Academics from more than 180 institutions, jointly led by the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, also successfully manipulated several key genes associated with the variants to extend their reproductive lifespan.

The research greatly increases our knowledge of the reproductive ageing process, could improve the prediction of which women might reach menopause earlier than others and lead to improvements in fertility treatment.

Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. Menopause occurs at about 50 years old, when most of a womans eggs have gone, although natural fertility wanes years earlier.

Co-author Professor Eva Hoffmann, of the University of Copenhagen, said: It is clear that repairing damaged DNA in eggs is very important for establishing the pool of eggs women are born with and also for how quickly they are lost throughout life.

Improved understanding of the biological processes involved in reproductive ageing could lead to improvements in fertility treatment options.

The study increased our knowledge of known genetic variations linked to reproductive lifespan, from 56 to 290.

Testing the effect of naturally-occurring genetic differences also enabled the researchers to examine the health impacts of having an earlier or later menopause. A genetically earlier menopause was found to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and was linked to poorer bone health and increased risk of fractures.

However, it reduced the risk of some types of cancer, such as ovarian and breast cancer, which are sensitive to sex hormones that are at higher levels while a woman is still menstruating.

The findings followed analyses of datasets from hundreds of thousands of women from sources including UK Biobank and 23andMe. Customers of 23andMe provided their data by opting in to the research.

Most of the data came from European women, but 80,000 of East Asian ancestry were included in the study, with broadly similar results.

They found many of the genes involved are linked to DNA repair processes. Many of these genes are active from before birth when human egg stores are created but also throughout life as well.

Two important cell cycle checkpoint pathways CHEK1 and CHEK2 - regulate a wide variety of DNA repair processes.

The research showed knocking out the CHEK2 gene so that it no longer functions, and over-expressing CHEK1 to enhance its activity each led to an approximately 25 per cent longer reproductive lifespan in mice.

While mouse reproductive physiology differs from humans - notably mice do not have menopause - the study also looked at women who naturally lack an active CHEK2 gene, and found they typically reach menopause 3.5 years later than women with a normally active gene.

Co-author Professor Ignasi Roig, from the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, said: We saw that two of the genes which produce proteins involved in repairing damaged DNA work in opposite ways with respect to reproduction in mice.

Female mice with more of the CHEK1 protein are born with more eggs and they take longer to deplete naturally, so reproductive lifespan is extended. However, while the second gene, CHEK2, has a similar effect, allowing eggs to survive longer, but in this case the gene has been knocked out so that no protein is produced suggesting that CHEK2 activation may cause egg death in adult mice.

The genes could be used to help predict which women are at highest risk of having menopause at a young age.

Co-author Dr Katherine Ruth, of the University of Exeter, said: We hope our work will help provide new possibilities to help women plan for the future. By finding many more of the genetic causes of variability in the timing of menopause, we have shown that we can start to predict which women might have earlier menopause and therefore struggle to get pregnant naturally. And because we are born with our genetic variations, we could offer this advice to young women.

Co-author Dr John Perry, of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, a senior author on the paper, said: This research is incredibly exciting. Although theres still a long way to go, by combining genetic analysis in humans with studies in mice, plus examining when these genes are switched on in human eggs, we now know a lot more about human reproductive ageing. It also gives us insights into how to help avoid some health problems that are linked to the timing of menopause.

The research collaboration involved was jointly led by the University of Exeter and the Cambridges MRC Epidemiology Unit, with the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona and the DNRF Center for Chromosome Stability at the University of Copenhagen.

The findings were published in Nature.

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The role of genetics in womens reproductive lifespan uncovered - and health impact of earlier menopause revealed - Cambridge Independent