Category Archives: Genome

ALBANY Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo unveiled an election-year grab bag of policy proposals Wednesday in his fourth State of the State, including funding for a genome research consortium between Buffalo and Manhattan, bonuses for top-performing public school teachers, modest tax breaks for property owners and tougher penalties for repeat drunk drivers and teens who text and drive.

Cuomo said he will dip again into his pledge made several years ago to spend $1 billion on Buffalo job creation efforts by authorizing a $100 million genome research program with $50 million going to the University at Buffalo and potentially other groups in the Buffalo area to connect scientists in Western New York with genome researchers at a new center in Manhattan.

Cuomo and researchers involved in the project said jobs and scientific breakthroughs to treat cancer and other diseases will result from the state investment. He said five companies already have committed to locate or expand on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus to be a part of a consortium with a not-for-profit genome center in Manhattan that opened last fall. Cuomo said the research work will create an entirely new industry for Western New York.

The 69-minute address also included a call for a major, $2 billion borrowing to fund new technological expansions and space for prekindergarten classrooms a bond program political analysts say is likely to bolster turnout in key geographic areas for an initiative that will appear on the same ballot as Cuomo in his first re-election bid this November.

A number of ideas, including expansion of abortion rights and taxpayer-financed campaigns, were rejected less than a year ago by Republicans who control the State Senate, and Cuomo made no mention, despite claims last fall to The Buffalo News that he would, about penalties or dramatic action for failing public schools.

Cuomo spent a third of his speech talking about what he called his accomplishments in his first three years, from a property tax cap to legalizing gay marriage to a sweeping gun-control measure.

In three years, my friends, you have reversed decades of decline, Cuomo told lawmakers in a state convention center near the Capitol.

Republican and Conservative Party leaders dismissed the Cuomo speech as election-year rhetoric with major new spending plans from a governor who should have embraced deeper tax cuts when he first took office.

In a hall with teeth-chattering temperatures, a favorite thermostat setting by this governor for his major, longer speeches, Cuomo offered the political spectrum of ideas in his address. For liberals, he said he will issue regulations to permit people with certain medical conditions to obtain marijuana to treat pain and other ailments at 20 hospitals around the state, seek to expand abortion rights, and raise the automatic, mandatory age from 16 to 18 at which teens arrested for crimes can be tried as an adult.

For right-of-center New Yorkers, he offered up a tax cut package for upstate manufacturers and beleaguered property taxpayers, a new state college focusing on counter-terrorism and homeland security and several criminal-justice measures, including crackdowns on repeat drunk drivers who he said should permanently lose their license if convicted of three DWI offenses.

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Cuomo envisions $100 million genome research facility

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The elephant shark has changed little in the last 420 million years, making its DNA sequence valuable for comparison with other vertebrate species.

A funky-looking fish with an outsized snout has become the most primitive jawed vertebrate to have its genome sequenced. The DNA sequence of the elephant shark helps to explain why sharks have a cartilaginous skeleton and how humans and other vertebrates evolved acquired immunity.

Elephant sharks (Callorhinchus milii) are part of an early evolutionary branch of cartilaginous fishes known as chimaeras, which are related to sharks and rays. They patrol the deep waters off southern Australia and New Zealand, and use their distinctive snouts to hunt for shellfish buried in the sand. Although elephant sharks are not known to attack humans, they sport a seven-centimetre-long spike on their dorsal fin, which is used to defend against predators.

Six years ago, scientists singled out C. milii as the first cartilaginous fish to be sequenced because of its relatively small genome about one-third the size of the human genome. We have had many genomes for amphibians, for birds and for mammals, but no sharks, says study author Byrappa Venkatesh, a comparative-genomics expert at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore.

Because the elephant shark is an early jawed vertebrate and has changed little since bony fishes appeared around 420 million years ago making it the slowest-evolving of all known vertebrates it serves as an important baseline for comparative genomics. We are going to use this as a reference for years to come, Venkatesh says. The genome was published today in Nature1.

So far, scientists have sequenced the genomes of eight bony fish and two jawless vertebrates known as lampreys. Sharks, skates, rays and chimaeras stand apart from other jawed vertebrates in having a skeleton that is made primarily of cartilage rather than bone. Although scientists knew what genes were involved in bone formation, it wasnt clear whether sharks had lost their bone-forming ability or just never had it in the first place. After all, sharks do make bone in their teeth and fin spines.

The sequence reveals that members of this group are missing a single gene family that regulates the process of turning cartilage into bone, and that a gene duplication event gave rise to the transformation in bony vertebrates. In fact, when the researchers knocked out one of these same genes in a zebrafish, it significantly reduced its ability to form bone.

John Postlethwait, a developmental biologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, calls the findings illuminating. He studies Antarctic icefish (Notothenioidei), which lost the ability to form bone over the course of evolution, and will look to see whether they lack the same genes that are missing from the elephant shark genome.

The C. milii genome also helps to answer important questions about the evolution of acquired immunity, which is the basis for vaccination and allows humans and other vertebrates to fight off new pathogens. Elephant sharks have killer T cells, which directly destroy body cells that have been infected by viruses, but they lack helper T cells, which help to regulate the overall immune response to an infection. The new sequence data suggest that acquired immunity evolved in a two-step process rather than in one step as previously thought.

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Why sharks have no bones

Roaming bits of DNA that can relocate and proliferate throughout the genome, called "jumping genes," may contribute to schizophrenia, a new study suggests. These rogue genetic elements pepper the brain tissue of deceased people with the disorder and multiply in response to stressful events, such as infection during pregnancy, which increase the risk of the disease. The study could help explain how genes and environment work together to produce the complex disorder and may even point to ways of lowering the risk of the disease, researchers say.

Schizophrenia causes hallucinations, delusions and a host of other cognitive problems, and afflicts roughly 1 percent of all people. It runs in families -- a person whose twin sibling has the disorder, for example, has a roughly 50-50 chance of developing it. Scientists have struggled to define which genes are most important to developing the disease, however; each individual gene associated with the disorder confers only modest risk. Environmental factors such as viral infections before birth also have been shown to increase risk of developing schizophrenia, but how and whether these exposures work together with genes to skew brain development and produce the disease is still unclear, says Tadafumi Kato, a neuroscientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako City, Japan, and co-author of the new study.

Over the past several years, a new mechanism for genetic mutation has attracted considerable interest from researchers studying neurological disorders, Kato says. Informally called jumping genes, these bits of DNA can replicate and insert themselves into other regions of the genome, where they either lie silent, doing nothing; start churning out their own genetic products; or alter the activity of their neighboring genes. If that sounds potentially dangerous, it is: Such genes are often the culprits behind tumor-causing mutations and have been implicated in several neurological diseases. However, jumping genes also make up nearly half the current human genome, suggesting that humans owe much of our identity to their audacious leaps.

Recent research by neuroscientist Fred Gage and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, has shown that one of the most common types of jumping gene in people, called L1, is particularly abundant in human stem cells in the brain that ultimately differentiate into neurons and plays an important role in regulating neuronal development and proliferation. Although Gage and colleagues have found that increased L1 is associated with mental disorders such as Rett syndrome, a form of autism, and a neurological motor disease called Louis-Bar syndrome, "no one had looked very carefully" to see if the gene might also contribute to schizophrenia, he says.

To investigate that question, principal investigator Kazuya Iwamoto, a neuroscientist; Kato; and their team at RIKEN extracted brain tissue of deceased people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as well as several other mental disorders, extracted DNA from their neurons, and compared it with that of healthy people. Compared with controls, there was a 1.1-fold increase in L1 in the tissue of people with schizophrenia, as well as slightly less elevated levels in people with other mental disorders such as major depression, the team reported last week in Neuron.

Next, the scientists tested whether environmental factors associated with schizophrenia could trigger a comparable increase in L1. They injected pregnant mice with a chemical that simulates viral infection and found that their offspring did show higher levels of the gene in their brain tissue. An additional study in infant macaque monkeys, which mimicked exposure to a hormone also associated with increased schizophrenia risk, produced similar results. Finally, the group examined human neural stem cells extracted from people with schizophrenia and found that these, too, showed higher levels of L1.

The fact that it is possible to increase the number of copies of L1 in the mouse and macaque brains using established environmental triggers for schizophrenia shows that such genetic mutations in the brain may be preventable if such exposures can be avoided, Kato says. He says he hopes that the "new view" that environmental factors can trigger or deter genetic changes involved in the disease will help remove some of the disorder's stigma.

Combined with previous studies on other disorders, the new study suggests that L1 genes are more active in the brain of patients with neuropsychiatric diseases, Gage says. He cautions, however, that no one yet knows whether they are actually causing the disease. "Now that we have multiple confirmations of this occurring in humans with different diseases, the next step is to determine if possible what role, if any, they play."

One tantalizing possibility is that as these restless bits of DNA drift throughout the genomes of human brain cells, they help create the vibrant cognitive diversity that helps humans as a species respond to changing environmental conditions, and produces extraordinary "outliers," including innovators and geniuses such as Picasso, says UC San Diego neuroscientist Alysson Muotri. The price of such rich diversity may be that mutations contributing to mental disorders such as schizophrenia sometimes emerge. Figuring out what these jumping genes truly do in the human brain is the "next frontier" for understanding complex mental disorders, he says. "This is only the tip of the iceberg."

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Study: 'Jumping genes' linked to schizophrenia

Waters' John Ornell plans to resign from his post as chief financial officer, effective Feb. 1, 2014, after which he will continue to serve the company as an advisor on a part-time basis. Eugene Cassis, who currently is corporate VP of worldwide business development and investor relations, will step into the CFO role on an interim basis when Ornell leaves the position. Cassis has been with the company for 33 years and has an extensive background in the firm's financial, operational, and technical activities.

RainDance Technologies has appointed Alfred Merriweather as CFO. He most recently served as CFO of Verinata Health prior to its acquisition by Illumina.

Previously, Merriweather served as CFO and in senior executive positions with several life science and clinical diagnostics companies, including Celera and Monogram Biosciences.

NuVasive, a medical device company that develops spinal surgical products and procedures, has appointed Greg Lucier to its board of directors.

Lucier is the chairman and CEO of Life Technologies, which is in the process of being acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific. He has also held senior management positions at General Electric.

PerkinElmer has appointed Jon DiVincezo to be president of its Environmental Health business and senior VP of the PerkinElmer. Maurice Tenney, who has led the Environmental Health business for four years, will start in a new position at PerkinElmer overseeing global operations and customer logistics. DiVincenzo will assume the new post on Dec. 2, and will report to Chairman and CEO Robert Friel. Prior to joining PerkinElmer, DiVincenzo served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Enzymatics, and before that he worked at Millipore for 18 years where he last served as president of the Bioscience division.

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Genome Compiler Asks USPTO to Reexamine DNA2.0 Patent in Ongoing Legal Row

A study on Amborella, a plant of remarkable heritage, reveals new information about the origins of flowers on Earth.

Amborella hails from an ancient evolutionary lineage and scientists who sequenced its genome say its DNA provides conclusive evidence that the ancestor of all flowering plants evolved following a polyploidy event, during which an organisms entire genome is duplicated. It happened about 200 million years ago.

Because redundant copies of genes can evolve to develop new functions, this doubling may be behind Darwins abominable mystery the apparently abrupt proliferation of new varieties of flowering plants in fossil records dating to the Cretaceous period, about 145 million years ago.

Some duplicated genes were lost over time, but others took on new functions, including contributions to the development of floral organs.

The research was led by scientists at Penn State University, UB, the University of Florida, the University of Georgia and the University of California, Riverside.

A paper by the Amborella Genome Sequencing Project that includes a full description of the analyses performed, as well as implications for flowering plant research, was published in the journal Science on Dec. 20. The article is among three on different research areas related to the Amborella genome that will be published in the same issue of the journal.

Of more than 300,000 flowering plant species alive today, Amborella (Amborella trichopoda) is unique as the sole survivor of an ancient evolutionary lineage that traces back to the last common ancestor of all flowering plants, according to the research team. The plant is a small understory tree found only on the main island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific.

This heritage gives Amborella a special role in the study of flowers, says Victor Albert, UB professor of biological sciences, who played a key role in leading the research effort.

In the same way that the genome sequence of the platypus a survivor of an ancient lineage can help us study the evolution of all mammals, the genome sequence of Amborella can help us learn about the evolution of all flowers, Albert says.

Generations of scientists have worked to solve the puzzle of why flowering plants suddenly proliferated in fossil records, says Claude dePamphilis of Penn State, another lead investigator.

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Study illuminates origin of flowers

Steven Pinker: Do Genome Hackers Invade DNA Privacy?
Full video from The Personal Genome Project available at: http://fora.tv/2013/04/25/Conversation_Steven_Pinker_on_Decline_of_Human_Violence Cognitive scienti...

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Steven Pinker: Do Genome Hackers Invade DNA Privacy? - Video

Genome The Fertility Clinic Kolkata - Corporate Film 2013

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Genome The Fertility Clinic Kolkata - Corporate Film 2013 - Video

Genome MPEG 4

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Genome MPEG 4 - Video

The Story of You: ENCODE and the human genome
Ever since a monk called Mendel started breeding pea plants we #39;ve been learning about our genomes. In 1953, Watson, Crick and Franklin described the structur...

By: Sehen Video

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THE LUCIFER GENOME
Globe-trotting blockbuster thriller features an unhinged Defense Intelligence Agency operative teaming up with a brilliant and sultry astrobiologist in a rac...

By: John Jeter

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THE LUCIFER GENOME - Video