Methyl groups tagged posts

Scientists gain new understanding of how Brain Cells Talk

-which could help in the Treatment of Mental Health conditions and Memory diseases

Experts from the University of Nottingham have discovered that reversing the modification of molecular messages at synapses in the human brain, may contribute to reversible mental health conditions such as anxiety, and memory diseases such as dementia.

The findings , published in Molecular Psychiatry, are a major step in our understanding how brain cells communicate, and could help to identify new treatments for neurological and psychiatric conditions.

The research was led by Dr Helen Miranda Knight in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham, along with researchers across the Schools of Medicine, Life Science, and Bioscience...

Read More

Blood Test Detects over 50 Types of Cancer, some before symptoms appear

Identification of cancer status for more than 50 cancer types, as well as tissue of origin localization, from a single blood draw. Cell-free DNA is isolated from blood samples drawn from a patient without cancer (top) or with cancer (bottom), and subjected to a targeted methylation sequencing assay. Sequencing results identifying methylated (red) or unmethylated (blue) CpG regions are fed into a machine-learning classifier that can identify the presence or absence of cancer, as well as identify the tissue of origin (TOO).

In a study involving thousands of participants, a new blood test detected more than 50 types of cancer as well as their location within the body with a high degree of accuracy, according to an international team of researchers led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and...

Read More

What your Father Ate before you were Born could Influence your Health

Father feeding child (stock image). Credit: © YakobchukOlena / Fotolia

Father feeding child (stock image). Credit: © YakobchukOlena / Fotolia

A new study sheds light on how. Researchers in Associate Professor Romain Barrès’ laboratory compared sperm cells from 13 lean men and 10 obese men and discovered that the sperm cells in lean and obese men, respectively, possess different epigenetic marks that could alter the next generation’s appetite, as reported in the medical journal Cell Metabolism.

A second major discovery was made as researchers followed 6 men before and 1 year after gastric-bypass surgery to find out how the surgery affected the epigenetic information contained in their sperm cells. The researchers observed an average of 4,000 structural changes to sperm cell DNA from the time before surgery, directly after, and 1 year later.

“We certainly nee...

Read More