allcancercure.com

Cryptorchidism, the congenital birth defect in which one or both testicles fail to descend into the scrotum, has been associated with certain genetic mutations, including a syndrome which is also a common cause of infertility, according to a study released on November 19, 2008 in JAMA.
As the most common congenital birth defect in male children, [...]

A team of U.S., Israeli and German scientists used computational biology techniques to discover 480 genes that play a role in human cell division and to identify more than 100 of those genes that have an abnormal pattern of activation in cancer cells.
Malignant cells have lost control of the replication process, so detecting differences in [...]

Loss of a small portion of chromosome 16, known as 16p11.2, is significantly associated with autism report researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in a recent article, published online by the journal Human Molecular Genetics.
Although this genetic “microdeletion” occurred in only [...]

The University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Carnegie Institution of Washington have announced that they have entered into licensing agreements with Oxford BioMedica (LSE: OXB), a gene therapy company, that grants the company rights to key RNA interference (RNAi) patent rights.
The technology was invented by Nobel-prize winning scientists Andrew Z. Fire, PhD, and Craig [...]

Backed by a government intent on promoting innovation and fuelled by the “brain gain” of talented scientists and entrepreneurs returning from abroad, China’s health biotech industry only needs a more favourable investment climate to emerge as a global force in the production of therapies and medicines - both new and low-cost generics - experts say [...]

A team of biologists have developed a model mapping the control circuit governing a whole free living organism. This is an important milestone for the new field of systems biology and will allow the researchers to model how the organism adapts over time in response to its environment. This study marks the first time researchers [...]

Genome rearrangements, resulting in variations in the numbers of copies of genes, occur when the cellular process that copies DNA during cell division stalls and then switches to a different genetic “template,” said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in a report that appears today in the journal Cell.
The new mechanism is called [...]

Cells keep a close watch over the transcriptome the totality of all parts of the genome that are expressed in any given cell at any given time. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of Missouri-Kansas City teamed up to peel back another layer of transcriptional regulation and gain new insight [...]

When humans began to migrate out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, their skin color gradually changed to adapt to their new environments. And when the last Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago, marine ancestors of ocean-dwelling stickleback fish experienced dramatic changes in skin coloring as they colonized newly formed lakes and streams. New [...]

Today researchers report new insights into how genetic variation may create phenotypic differences between individuals. This study, which investigates the influence of mutations associated with obesity on the mechanism of splicing, is published online in Genome Research .
Many visible differences are apparent between individuals, ranging from height and weight to hair and eye color. [...]