human genome tagged posts

New insights into the prevalence and mechanisms of gene misexpression in a healthy population could help in diagnosing and developing treatments for complex diseases.

Scientists have uncovered that ‘gene misbehaviour’ – where genes are active when they were expected to be switched off – is a surprisingly common phenomenon in the healthy human population.

The team also identify several mechanisms behind these gene activity errors. This may help inform precision medicine approaches and enable the development of targeted therapies to correct expression.

Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Univer...

A team of researchers led by Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT has uncovered the first programmable RNA-guided system in eukaryotes—organisms that include fungi, plants, and animals.

In a study published in Nature, the team describes how the system is based on a protein called Fanzor. They showed that Fanzor proteins use RNA as a guide to target DNA precisely, and that Fanzors can be reprogrammed to edit the genome of human cells...

Cancer cells growing in a dish

Scientists have mapped out the genes that keep our cells alive, creating a long-awaited foothold for understanding how our genome works and which genes are crucial in disease like cancer. A team of Toronto researchers have switched off, one by one, almost 18,000 genes – 90% of the entire human genome – to find the genes that are essential for cell survival. The data revealed a “core” set of more than 1,500 essential genes. This lays the foundation for reaching the long-standing goal in biomedical research of pinpointing a role for every single gene in the genome.

By turning genes off in 5 different cancer cell lines, including brain, retinal, ovarian, and 2 kinds of colorectal cancer cells, the team uncovered that each tumour relies on a unique set of genes t...