Body

DETROIT – Extending hepatitis C treatment for liver transplant patients beyond current standards results in high clearance rates of the hepatitis C virus from the blood, and a low relapse rate, according to a study by Henry Ford Hospital.

"We found that patients who achieved a sustained virological response were more likely to have had extended treatment after transplant," says Matthew Moeller, M.D., gastroenterology fellow at Henry Ford Hospital and lead author of the study.

If you thought the best way to lose and maintain weight was the slow and steady approach, think again. A new study by Lisa Nackers and colleagues, from the University of Florida in the US, suggests that the key to long-term weight loss and maintenance is to lose weight quickly, not gradually, in the initial stages of obesity treatment. Their findings(1) are published online in Springer's International Journal of Behavioral Medicine.

Three new genetic loci have been identified with involvement in subtle and quantitative variation of human eye colour. The study, led by Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands, is published May 6 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

Scientists in Ohio studying Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) have concluded that the technology now exists to carry out nationwide screening of newborn children and pregnant mothers. The study, published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, reveals that effective screening may allow parents to find proactive treatments before the symptoms become irreversible.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Chronic pain severely limits patients' quality of life and is among the cost drivers in U.S. health care. Patients can suffer pain without an apparent cause and often fail to respond to available treatments. Mayo Clinic researchers and collaborators now report that chronic pain may be caused by the inadvertent reprogramming of more than 2,000 genes in the peripheral nervous system. The research findings appear in the current issue of the journal Genome Research.

People aren't the only living things that suffer from stress. Trees must deal with stress too. It can come from a lack of water or too much water, from scarcity of a needed nutrient, from pollution or a changing climate. Helping trees and crops adapt to stress quickly and efficiently is a pressing goal of plant biologists worldwide.

SANTA CRUZ, CA--After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, yielding important new insights into the evolution of modern humans.

Among the findings, published in the May 7 issue of Science, is evidence that shortly after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them interbred with Neanderthals, leaving bits of Neanderthal DNA sequences scattered through the genomes of present-day non-Africans.

HOUSTON, May 6, 2010 – The assembly of the first comprehensive DNA sequence of an amphibian genome will shed light on the study of embryonic development, with implications for preventing birth defects and more effectively treating many human diseases.

Emory University scientists have discovered that simple peptides can organize into bi-layer membranes. The finding suggests a "missing link" between the pre-biotic Earth's chemical inventory and the organizational scaffolding essential to life.

Some of the human immune system's defences against the virus that causes dengue fever actually help the virus to infect more cells, according to new research published today in the journal Science.

The researchers behind the work, from Imperial College London, hope their new findings could help with the design of a vaccine against the dengue virus. The study also brings scientists closer to understanding why people who contract dengue fever more than once usually experience more severe and dangerous symptoms the second time around.

A breakthrough about the formation and maintenance of tree-like nerve cell structures could have future applications in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and the repair of injuries in which neurons are damaged. The findings by the international team led by Prof. Benjamin Podbilewicz of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Biology are published in the May 6th issue of Science Express.

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – How much do we, who are alive today, differ from our most recent evolutionary ancestors, the cave-dwelling Neandertals, hominids who lived in Europe and parts of Asia and went extinct about 30,000 years ago? And how much do Neandertals, in turn, have in common with the ape-ancestors from which we are both descended, the chimpanzees?

Researchers have produced the first whole genome sequence of the 3 billion letters in the Neanderthal genome, and the initial analysis suggests that up to 2 percent of the DNA in the genome of present-day humans outside of Africa originated in Neanderthals or in Neanderthals' ancestors.

The international research team, which includes researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health, reports its findings in the May 7, 2010, issue of Science.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers recently released study data showing children who lived near major highway or railroad intersections have higher diagnoses of asthma. The researchers used this study to show how neighborhood environment is a risk factor in understanding the development of pediatric asthma. The study appears in a recent addition of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.