Tag Archives: chromosomes

Cutting cancer cell immortality short

News: Major Disease Cures    March 1, 2010
One of the characteristics of cancer cells is that they don’t die of old age. In a sense, they’re immortal – though of course they can be killed. The main reason for their longevity has been traced to telomeres a strip of non-coding genes at the ends of chromosomes. When normal cells replicate very often [...]
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Follow-up: Another ‘junk DNA’ study

News: DNA Decoding    February 23, 2010
The blog Science Life (University of Chicago Medical Center) has an excellent follow-up piece to the story about the discovery of non-coding DNA that contributes to heart disease (SciTechStory: More ‘junk DNA’ that actually does something) The Science Life post mentions that work and details another study done by the University of Chicago and [...]
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Personalized monitoring of cancer recovery

News: Major Disease Cures    February 20, 2010
Step by step the treatment of cancer becomes more personalized. The latest advance, in research from John’s Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA), uses a full-genome DNA sequence of a patient’s cancer to determine its ‘signature.’ Thereafter, in screens of blood tests, that signature – usually consisting of the more obvious chunks of rearranged DNA rather than [...]
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New study: Genetic variations associated with aging

News: Extending Lifespan    February 8, 2010
Sometimes the shortest distance to new knowledge is a lot of repetitious work – like analyzing 500,000 genetic variations across the entire human genome. Researchers at King’s College London (UK), Leicester University (UK), and the University of Groningen (Netherlands) were on the trail of locating genes associated with aging. This is part of the (perhaps) [...]
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Mapping human genome variations

News: DNA Decoding    October 18, 2009
The mapping of the human genome was a monumental achievement; however, it was always intended to be just a starting point. Where has the follow-up work gone? One area is mapping of copy number variants. Normally our (non-sex) chromosomes come in twos (humans are said to be diploid), but the machinery of DNA reproduction [...]
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