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Category: genetics – Page 178

DNA methylation and cardiovascular disease in humans: a systematic review and database of known CpG methylation sites

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide and considered one of the most environmentally driven diseases. The role of DNA methylation in response to the individual exposure for the development and progression of CVD is still poorly understood and a synthesis of the evidence is lacking.

A systematic review of articles examining measurements of DNA cytosine methylation in CVD was conducted in accordance with PRISMA (preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses) guidelines. The search yielded 5,563 articles from PubMed and CENTRAL databases. From 99 studies with a total of 87,827 individuals eligible for analysis, a database was created combining all CpG-, gene-and study-related information. It contains 74,580 unique CpG sites, of which 1,452 CpG sites were mentioned in ≥ 2, and 441 CpG sites in ≥ 3 publications. Two sites were referenced in ≥ 6 publications: cg01656216 (near ZNF438) related to vascular disease and epigenetic age, and cg03636183 (near F2RL3) related to coronary heart disease, myocardial infarction, smoking and air pollution. Of 19,127 mapped genes, 5,807 were reported in ≥ 2 studies.

How CRISPR is making farmed animals bigger, stronger, and healthier

The technology could eventually revolutionize health care. We’ve seen CRISPR start to be used experimentally to treat children with cancer, for example. It is being explored for lots of genetic diseases. And last year, a company used CRISPR to try to treat a woman with dangerously high cholesterol.

But CRISPR could also transform farming, including aquaculture. This week, I wrote about researchers who inserted an alligator gene into catfish. The idea isn’t to make these fish more alligator-like, but to make them more resistant to disease. It turns out that alligators have a particular talent for fighting off infections.

These gene-edited fish, pigs, and other animals could soon be on the menu.

Are ‘Zombie Cells’ Ageing Your Skin? Here’s What To Know

Busso also said we don’t yet know the long-term effects of these treatments on normal cells or what the long-term impact of killing zombie cells might be. Additionally, because zombie cells play an important role in wound healing, “We don’t want to remove all of them,” he said. “We don’t know the ideal regimen, daily versus weekly versus monthly.”

Hopefully, we won’t have to wait long for answers about the best way to get rid of zombie cells on the skin. “Major breakthroughs and contributions to delaying of the aging process are expected in the near future,” Busso said.

Although it’s still unclear whether zombie cells can be safely and effectively cleared from the skin, it is possible to prevent some zombie cells from forming in the first place. Collins explained that zombie cells are formed as the result of both biological and environmental factors. “The internal factors, like aging or genetic disease, are not so much within our control,” but the external factors can be controlled, she said.

Epigenetic Age Test #6: My Youngest Data For Horvath, DunedinPACE

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A jump through time — new technique rewinds the age of skin cells by 30 years

Research from the Babraham Institute has developed a method to ‘time jump’ human skin cells by 30 years, turning back the ageing clock for cells without losing their specialised function. Work by researchers in the Institute’s Epigenetics research programme has been able to partly restore the function of older cells, as well as rejuvenating the molecular measures of biological age. The research is published today in the journal eLife and whilst at an early stage of exploration, it could revolutionise regenerative medicine.

What is regenerative medicine?

As we age, our cells’ ability to function declines and the genome accumulates marks of ageing. Regenerative biology aims to repair or replace cells including old ones. One of the most important tools in regenerative biology is our ability to create ‘induced’ stem cells. The process is a result of several steps, each erasing some of the marks that make cells specialised. In theory, these stem cells have the potential to become any cell type, but scientists aren’t yet able to reliably recreate the conditions to re-differentiate stem cells into all cell types.

Scientists have created synthetic human embryos. Now we must consider the ethical and moral quandaries

Researchers have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, according to media reports. Remarkably, these embryos have reportedly been created from embryonic stem cells, meaning they do not require sperm and ova.

This , widely described as a breakthrough that could help scientists learn more about human development and genetic disorders, was revealed this week in Boston at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

The research, announced by Professor Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz of the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology, has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. But Żernicka-Goetz told the meeting these human-like embryos had been made by reprogramming .

Reversing Baldness: Surprising New Molecular Mechanism Discovered for Stimulating Hair Growth

Researchers have discovered that senescent pigment cells in skin moles can stimulate robust hair growth, challenging the belief that these cells impede regeneration. The study showed that molecules osteopontin and CD44 play a key role in this process, potentially opening new avenues for therapies for common hair loss conditions.

The process by which aged, or senescent, pigment-making cells in the skin cause significant growth of hair inside skin moles, called nevi, has been identified by a research team led by the University of California, Irvine. The discovery may offer a road map for an entirely new generation of molecular therapies for androgenetic alopecia, a common form of hair loss in both women and men.

The study, published on June 21 in the journal Nature, describes the essential role that the osteopontin and CD44 molecules play in activating hair growth inside hairy skin nevi. These skin nevi accumulate particularly large numbers of senescent pigment cells and yet display very robust hair growth.

Mayo Clinic researchers pioneer AI method to predict how cells are organized in disease microenvironments

Cells in the human body, the building blocks of life, are arranged in a precise way. That’s necessary because pathways and spaces provide a means for cells to communicate, collaborate and function within the specific tissue or organ. Changes in cell arrangement can lead to uncontrolled cell growth, cell death and diseases, including cancer.

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine and Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed an artificial intelligence method, called Spatially Informed Artificial Intelligence (SPIN-AI). This new deep-learning technique can analyze the genetic information of individual cells to reconstruct the precise layout of the cells in a tissue, without preexisting knowledge of how the cells are organized.

The new study detailing SPIN-AI is published in Biomolecules.

Discovery of novel primitive xeno nucleic acids as alternative genetic polymers adds piece to origin of life puzzle

The chemical origin of life on Earth is a puzzle that scientists have been trying to piece together for decades. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain how life came to be and what chemical and environmental factors on early Earth could have led to it. A step required in a number of these hypotheses involves the abiotic synthesis of genetic polymers—materials made up of a sequence of repeating chemical units with the ability to store and pass down information through base-pairing interactions.

One such hypothesis is the RNA () world hypothesis, which draws from this concept and suggests that RNA could have been the original biopolymer of life both for genetic information storage and transmission, and for catalysis. However, in the absence of chemical activation of RNA monomers, studies have found that RNA polymerization would have been inefficient under primitive dry-down conditions without specialized circumstances such as lipid or salt-assisted synthesis or mineral templating.

While this does not necessarily make the RNA world hypothesis less plausible, primitive chemical systems were quite diverse and could not have possibly been as clean to just contain RNA and lipids, suggesting that other forms of primitive nucleic polymerization may have also taken place.