Body

In the most comprehensive exploration of the association between genetic variation and human metabolism, researchers have provided unprecedented insights into how genetic variants influence complex disease and drug response through metabolic pathways.

The team has linked 145 genetic regions with more than 400 molecules involved in human metabolism in human blood. This atlas of genetic associations with metabolism provides many new opportunities to understand the molecular pathways underlying associations with common, complex diseases.

Cambridge, MA—Harvard scientists have merged stem cell and 'organ-on-a-chip' technologies to grow, for the first time, functioning human heart tissue carrying an inherited cardiovascular disease. The research appears to be a big step forward for personalized medicine, as it is working proof that a chunk of tissue containing a patient's specific genetic disorder can be replicated in the laboratory.

The breakthrough, published in the journal Nature Materials, could offer an easier way of detecting pathogenic bacteria outside of a clinical setting and could be particularly important for the developing world, where access to more sophisticated laboratory techniques is often limited.

Our bodies produce a family of proteins that recognize and kill bacteria whose carbohydrate coatings resemble those of our own cells too closely, scientists have discovered.

Called galectins, these proteins recognize carbohydrates from a broad range of disease-causing bacteria, and could potentially be deployed as antibiotics to treat certain infections. The results are scheduled for publication in Nature Chemical Biology.

Research from North Carolina State University shows that blueberries produce more seeds and larger berries if they are visited by more diverse bee species, allowing farmers to harvest significantly more pounds of fruit per acre.

"We wanted to understand the functional role of diversity," says Dr. Hannah Burrack, an associate professor of entomology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research. "And we found that there is a quantifiable benefit of having a lot of different types of bees pollinating a crop."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (May 9, 2014) – Whitehead Institute scientists have identified a genetic cause of a facial disorder known as hemifacial microsomia (HFM). The researchers find that duplication of the gene OTX2 induces HFM, the second-most common facial anomaly after cleft lip and palate.

HFM affects approximately one in 3,500 births. While some cases appear to run in families, no gene had been found to be causative. That is until Whitehead Fellow Yaniv Erlich and his lab set out to do just that. Their work is described in this week's issue of the journal PLOS ONE.

TORONTO – A new drug approach has been developed for safer clean-up of deformed blood vessels in the eye by a research team at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

The growth of malformed blood vessels that can burst is a leading cause of vision loss in North America. Retinopathy and retina degeneration are associated with premature birth, with diabetes, and with increasing age.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Scientists at the University of California, Riverside have discovered a fossil of a newly discovered organism from the "Ediacara Biota" — a group of organisms that occurred in the Ediacaran period of geologic time.

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – May 9, 2014) St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists studying two rare, inherited childhood neurodegenerative disorders have identified a new, possibly common source of DNA damage that may play a role in other neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and aging. The findings appear in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.

A few minutes spent filling out a widely accepted mental health assessment in a health care provider's waiting room could make a big difference for some teenagers suffering from depression, according to new study from a nursing researcher at The University of Texas at Arlington.

Boston, MA – Calcium supplements are widely taken by women for bone health. Previous studies have suggested that calcium supplements may increase risk of cardiovascular disease, but the data has been inconsistent. A new study by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) did not find that calcium supplement intake increases risk of cardiovascular disease in women.

The study is published online this month in Osteoporosis International.

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have identified the mechanism by which an enzyme produced in the intestinal lining helps to maintain a healthy population of gastrointestinal microbes. In their report in American Journal of Physiology – Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, the research team describes finding that intestinal alkaline phosphatase (IAP) promotes the growth of beneficial bacteria by blocking the growth-inhibiting action of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) – an action first described in this paper – within the intestine.

Scientists from the University of the Philippines, Los Baños have discovered a new plant species with an unusual lifestyle — it eats nickel for a living — accumulating up to 18,000 ppm of the metal in its leaves without itself being poisoned, says Professor Edwino Fernando, lead author of the report. Such an amount is a hundred to a thousand times higher than in most other plants. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

UPTON, NY-Plant scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have found that certain enzymes responsible for desaturating fatty acids, the building blocks of oils, can link up to efficiently pass intermediate products from one enzyme to another. "Engineering these enzyme interactions to channel metabolites along desired metabolic pathways could be a new approach for tailoring plants to produce useful products," said Brookhaven biochemist John Shanklin, lead author on a paper reporting the results in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Researchers at Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center have published results from a study in Cell Reports that discovers a new mechanism that distinguishes normal blood stem cells from blood cancers.

"These findings constitute a significant advance toward the goal of killing leukemia cells without harming the body's normal blood stem cells which are often damaged by chemotherapy," said Patricia Ernst, PhD, co-director of the Cancer Mechanisms Program of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center and an associate professor in Genetics at the Geisel School of Medicine.