Category Archives: Transhuman News

How Pernell Marsh discovered Marketing was in his DNA

By: UCLAExtensionMedia

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How Pernell Marsh discovered Marketing was in his DNA - Video

Missing DNA reports that allegedly could tie Jesse I. Chavez to the 2012 murder of Ralph Chavez, no relation, are the focus of a defense motion seeking to reduce Jesse Chavezs bond.

A court wants answers on the delays, which the prosecution chalks up to a lab analyst who left the official request for analysis sitting in a drawer after she left her job at the crime lab.

Second Judicial District Judge Christina Argyres heard a defense motion Wednesday to reduce the $1 million, cash-only bond for Jesse Chavez, 32, or release him from custody. Argyres ultimately decided to conduct an evidentiary hearing at 2:30 p.m. Nov. 6.

Jesse Chavez was arrested Oct. 19, 2012, and charged with killing the son of state Rep. Ernest Chavez on Oct. 8, 2012, at Ralph Chavezs home in the 1400 block of La Vega SW during a burglary. Ralph Chavez was killed by a gunshot, and a friend who was at the home at the time, Michael Mirabal, was wounded.

Assistant Public Defender Cindy Leos said in her written request that the state has no evidence that links defendant to this crime.

Forensic evidence does not link her client, she said in a motion, and the confidential informant, interviewed by the defense, said he never made statements to law enforcement about the murder.

Meanwhile, Jesse Chavez has been jailed for over a year.

Even the state concedes that a change in conditions of release is appropriate.

The confidential informant recanted, Assistant District Attorney Kevin Holmes said in a written response, so links that could be made via forensic evidence have been the primary reason for the delay.

The metro crime lab, which handles both Albuquerque Police Department and Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office cases, was asked in June by the DAs Office to conduct a large-scale analysis of evidence to compare DNA samples with individuals, including the accused.

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Missing DNA reports at heart of defense motion

LEBANON, IN (WAVE) - Touch DNA findings, critical to David Camm's defense, are among the worst and most unreliable examples of analyses she's seen in almost a quarter century, a forensic DNA consultant told jurors in Camm's third murder trial Tuesday.

"I've never met David Camm in my life," Dr. Norah Rudin testified. And I hadn't heard of (Richard) Eichelenboom or his firm. But to see his findings was quite a shock."

Rudin's degree is in Molecular Biology and Genetics, but she specializes in verifying whether a DNA lab's procedures and precautions are scientifically solid enough to justify its findings. Prosecutors called her as a rebuttal witness to refute claims from Dutch DNA specialist Richard Eichelenboom, whose tests concluded that Charles Boney left DNA on Kim Camm's sweater-blouse and underwear, and Jill Camm's shirt.

The defense has argued Charles Boney alone is responsible for killing Camm's wife Kim, son Bradley, 7, and daughter Jill, 5, more than 13 years ago. Boney is serving a 225-year sentence for the murders, but he was arrested only after Camm's first conviction was overturned on appeal. DNA testing linked him to a sweatshirt left at the murder scene.

Boney has claimed he did nothing more than deliver the murder weapon and heard Camm fire the fatal shots. But Eichelenboom testified last week that his findings suggest Kim Camm may have struggled or fought with Boney before she and her children were killed.

Earlier testing had concluded that the DNA samples in question didn't yield enough information to tie them to a specific person. Rudin told jurors Eichelenboom's sampling was so large it created noisy data that made his results unreliable.

"Most of his samples were-crime scene samples, which does not substitute for using known samples," Dr. Rudin said. "He doesn't take into account this missing information, he just pretends it doesn't exist."

Eichelenboom testified that an associate conducted the actual tests; the same associate found to have given wrong answers on profiency tests in 2011 and 2012. Eichelenboom blamed the testing kits themselves.

Rudin described the tests as a fairly easy way to determine basic competency. But Camm's team had fought allowing jurors to hear that.

Before Rudin took the stand, lead counsel Richard Kammen called her anticipated testimony hearsay, because it relied upon email correspondence between the testing company and another DNA consultant. He interrupted her when she broached the subject, and asked that the jury be excused.

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Camm Trial - October 15, 2013: Rebuttal: Camm prosecutors attack validity of Touch DNA

A Swiss research team has been working on a way to identify the origin of pearls without destroying the valuable gemstones. Last week, they reported their success in extracting trace DNA samples from various cultured pearls in the journal PLoS ONE. Being able to capture the DNA fingerprint of a pearl will allow jewelers and traders to trace the origin and age of gems, and also pick out the fakes that are passed off as more valuable than they actually are.

This DNA fingerprinting method could be used to document the source of historic pearls and will provide more transparency for traders and consumers within the pearl industry, wrote lead author Joana B. Meyer, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Despite what you might have heard, pearls are not typically formed when an oyster or mussel ingests a bit of sand. Pearls are actually more like shiny, pretty scabs resulting from an injury or parasite in a mollusks mantle tissue. In response to this injury, the shellfish creates a sac and deposits a mixture of the mineral aragonite and an organic compound called conchiolin, a composite typically known as nacre, also known as mother of pearl.

Natural pearls are produced in oysters without human intervention, and are considered far more valuable than cultured pearls. Cultured pearls are made by grafting a small piece of mantle tissue from one mollusk onto another, often also with a small hard bead that forms the nucleus of the growing pearl and ensures that the gem is as spherical as possible. Cultured pearls sometimes get passed off as natural pearls to unsuspecting consumers. Plus, some cultured pearls are made with haste, creating a flawed gem thats mostly bead covered with a thin layer of nacre that chips off over time. The pearl industry would love to have a way to definitively determine a pearls origin.

But how do you squeeze DNA from a stone? The pearl, remember, is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and organic material. And that organic matter, plus any stray bits of tissue that have ended up inside the pearl, houses DNA inside it.

In order to isolate DNA from the pearl without destroying it, the Swiss team used a very fine drill to expand existing holes in the gems. Using DNA scraped from the pearls, the researchers were able to trace sample pearls to three of the major pearl-producing oyster species: Pinctada margaritifera, P. maxima and P. radiata.

With this method, it may be possible to recover DNA from pearls that are centuries old. The researchers point out that other scientists have been able to extract DNA from ancient bones, teeth and eggshells.

The researchers anticipate that their methods, coupled with detailed population genetic analyses of reference oyster populations could enable individual pearls to be assigned to specific oyster populations, allowing a scientific assignment of a pearl's origin.

SOURCE: Meyer et al. DNA Fingerprinting of Pearls to Determine Their Origins. PLoS ONE published online 9 October 2013.

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Pearl DNA Analysis Now Possible: Method Could Help Industry ID Fakes, Scientists Say

Oct. 16, 2013 The medical, humanitarian and economical impact of viral diseases is devastating to humans and livestock. There are no adequate therapies available against most viral diseases, largely because the mechanisms by which viruses infect cells are poorly known. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Zurich headed by cell biologist Prof. Urs Greber now presents a method that can be used to display viral DNA in host cells at single-molecule resolution. The method gives unexpected insights into the distribution of viral DNA in cells, and the reaction of cells to viral DNA.

Click chemistry detects viral DNA

For their studies, Greber and his team with PhD students I-Hsuan Wang, Vardan Andriasyan and senior research scientist Dr. Maarit Suomalainen used cell cultures and human adenoviruses causing respiratory disease and conjunctivitis, herpes viruses and vaccinia virus, the latter in collaboration with Dr. Jason Mercer and his PhD student Samuel Kilcher from the ETH Zurich. To label the DNA of an intact virus, the scientists turned to click chemistry -- widely applicable chemical reaction types. Prof. Nathan Luedtke from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Zurich, and PhD student Anne Neef developed a new class of "clickable" chemical molecules. "Our molecule is incorporated into viral DNA without affecting the biological functions of the DNA, and it can be used to label the DNA for fluorescence microscopy," says Luedtke.

Defense response of infected cells visible for the first time

Greber and his team infected human cells in culture with the chemically labeled viruses, and observed the behavior of the viral DNA during entry into cells. "Using this elegant method, we can reveal that not all the incoming viral DNA enters the cell nucleus as originally expected, but a significant fraction remains in the cytosol, the fluids of the cytoplasm," explains Greber. According to the scientists, this phenomenon may be part of the antiviral defense reaction. "For the first time, we can display the localization of incoming viral DNA, and link it to anti-viral defense or infection mechanisms," says Greber. The researchers show that cells of the same type take up different amounts of viral DNA into their nucleus. Greber suspects that the nucleus has antiviral defense reactions, akin to the cytosol, and these defense reactions are variable between cells. With the new method in hand, this is now subject to future studies. The scientists suggest that their procedure can be applied to other DNA viruses, or the HI virus (HIV).

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Tracking viral DNA in the cell: New method to generate virus particles containing labeled viral DNA genomes

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis say it may someday be possible to perform a single test to screen for a wide range of cancer types.

Scientists led by Dr. Li Ding have analyzed the DNA of 3,281 tumors to find 127 repeatedly mutated genes that appear to drive the growth of a range of cancers.

Thanks to recent advances in genome sequencing that allow scientists to analyze DNA faster and more affordably than ever before, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis say they have found that many types of cancer are driven by the same genetic mutations.

The scientists have been able to analyze 3,281 tumors to find 127 genes that repeatedly mutate in such a way as to drive the development of tumors in the body.

Previous genome studies have tended to home in on specific tumor types, but the work out of St. Louis, which appears this week in the journal Nature, is among the first to look at a wide range of what are sometimes seemingly unrelated tumor types. In fact, the thousands of tumors they analyzed included 12 major cancers: of the breast, uterus, bladder, kidney, ovary, lung, brain, blood, head and neck, and colon and rectum.

"This is just the beginning," senior author Li Ding of the university's Genome Institute said in a school news release of her team's findings. "Many oncologists and scientists have wondered whether it's possible to come up with a complete list of cancer genes responsible for all human cancers. I think we're getting closer to that."

In fact, the researchers say they envision a future where it's possible to perform a single test to survey all 127 of these identified genetic errors as part of a standard diagnostic workup for most cancers. Such a test could, in turn, not only identify unique genetic signatures of tumors but open the door for highly personalized cancer treatments as well.

While the researchers found common links between genes in different cancers (for instance, one gene mutated in 25 percent of leukemia cases was also found in seven other tumor types), they also found mutations that are particular to one.

To add to the complexity, some of the 127 genetic errors occur frequently in certain cancers, while some appear rarely in others, but all are being considered an important part of the growth of the cancers. The researchers did find, however, that most tumors had only two to six genetic mutations. Ding said that because cells are constantly accumulating new mutations over time, the finding that only a couple of mutations are key to turning a healthy cell into a cancerous one could help explain why cancer is so common.

The DNA analysis also helped the researchers identify genes that correlate strongly with not only cancer types but actual prognosis. TP53, for instance, was found more than any other across the different tumor types -- in 42 percent of the samples -- and is particularly bad news in cancers of the kidney, head and neck, and acute myeloid leukemia. BAP1, too, was often linked with poor prognoses, especially in kidney and uterine cancers.

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DNA analysis uncovers genetic errors behind 12 major cancers

Oct. 16, 2013 Cell biologists and chemists from the University of Zurich reveal how viral DNA traffics in human cells. They have developed a new method to generate virus particles containing labeled viral DNA genomes. This allowed them to visualize, for the first time, single viral genomes in the cytoplasm and the nucleus by using fluorescence microscopy in regular or superresolution mode. The new findings enhance our understanding of how viral disease occurs, and how cells respond to infections.

The medical, humanitarian and economical impact of viral diseases is devastating to humans and livestock. There are no adequate therapies available against most viral diseases, largely because the mechanisms by which viruses infect cells are poorly known. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Zurich headed by cell biologist Prof. Urs Greber now presents a method that can be used to display viral DNA in host cells at single-molecule resolution. The method gives unexpected insights into the distribution of viral DNA in cells, and the reaction of cells to viral DNA.

Click chemistry detects viral DNA

For their studies, Greber and his team with PhD students I-Hsuan Wang, Vardan Andriasyan and senior research scientist Dr. Maarit Suomalainen used cell cultures and human adenoviruses causing respiratory disease and conjunctivitis, herpes viruses and vaccinia virus, the latter in collaboration with Dr. Jason Mercer and his PhD student Samuel Kilcher from the ETH Zurich. To label the DNA of an intact virus, the scientists turned to click chemistry -- widely applicable chemical reaction types. Prof. Nathan Luedtke from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Zurich, and PhD student Anne Neef developed a new class of "clickable" chemical molecules. "Our molecule is incorporated into viral DNA without affecting the biological functions of the DNA, and it can be used to label the DNA for fluorescence microscopy," says Luedtke.

Defense response of infected cells visible for the first time

Greber and his team infected human cells in culture with the chemically labeled viruses, and observed the behavior of the viral DNA during entry into cells. "Using this elegant method, we can reveal that not all the incoming viral DNA enters the cell nucleus as originally expected, but a significant fraction remains in the cytosol, the fluids of the cytoplasm," explains Greber. According to the scientists, this phenomenon may be part of the antiviral defense reaction. "For the first time, we can display the localization of incoming viral DNA, and link it to anti-viral defense or infection mechanisms," says Greber. The researchers show that cells of the same type take up different amounts of viral DNA into their nucleus. Greber suspects that the nucleus has antiviral defense reactions, akin to the cytosol, and these defense reactions are variable between cells. With the new method in hand, this is now subject to future studies. The scientists suggest that their procedure can be applied to other DNA viruses, or the HI virus (HIV).

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Tracking viral DNA in the cell