Daily Archives: June 11, 2013

Mladen Antonov / AFP - Getty Images file

A woman holds a banner demanding a ban over human genes patents during a protest outside the Supreme Court in Washington on April 15.

By Maggie Fox, Senior Writer, NBC News

Can someone else patent your genes? The Supreme Court is scheduled to rule some time this month on that question a suit filed against Myriad Genetics for its patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations, which raise the risk of breast, ovarian and certain other cancers.

Opponents of patenting human DNA say a ruling in favor of Myriad will mean companies can own your genes, even though experts say it's more complicated than that. The patents set off a cascade of effects, opponents argue: it gives the company a monopoly on the test that can identify whether patients have the BRCA mutations so other companies can't offer their own tests as a second opinion. There's also no one to compete with the Myriad's $3,000 price tag on the test.

Myriad has long argued that it's not patenting anyone's genes. Instead, the company says, it separates them from the rest of the DNA and creates lab-made copies -- and that's what is patented and used in the test. The company has also licensed a few medical centers to run second-opinion tests.

But some say that regardless of how the court decides, it's likely the average person won't really be affected in any obvious, immediate way. Myriad's first 20-year patent on the genes runs out next year, although patent experts say the company has a variety of opportunities to extend that by a few years.

Even if the patents are thrown out today, that doesnt make the test available since it would take time for other companies to develop a test, said John Conley, a law professor at the University of North Carolina whos taken a special interest in the case. The patents are going to expire before any competitors could come into the field anyway.

This case would have been a lot more important had it been decided 10 or 12 years ago," he added. "A lot of things have happened in law and science since then."

The science has now moved far beyond the clunky, whole-gene sequencing method that Myriad uses so it's becoming less relevant. Companies can now sequence your entire genome for you, and in a few years they might even be able to interpret the information in a meaningful way.

Here is the original post:
What DNA ruling means for you

THUWAL, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, June 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biology and Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of DNA Replication and Recombination, Dr. Samir M. Hamdan, and his team, have published a groundbreaking paper on the mechanism of flap endonuclease 1 (FEN1), in Cell Reports journal. The other authors of the paper, entitled "Sequential and Multistep Substrate Interrogation Provides the Scaffold for Specificity in Human Flap Endonuclease 1," are: Mohamed A. Sobhy, Luay I. Joudeh, Xiaojuan Huang, and Masateru Takahashi.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130611/619032 )

5' nucleases, the superfamily to which FEN1 belongs,represent structure-specific nucleases essential for DNA replication, repair, and recombination. Deficiencies in their genes have been linked to several types of cellular stress and genomic instability.Their outstanding puzzle is that they are highly conserved proteins, yet they recognize a diverse range of RNA and DNA structures and cleave them primarily at the same position relative to a 5' end of a junction.

Structural studies propose a solution for this geometrical puzzle by capturing a DNA bending intermediary step that position the 5' end in the enzyme active pocket and unify the 5' nucleases cleavage site. However, these structures remain a static image of the DNA bending intermediary step based on which speculation was made to address the most important questions regarding how this intermediary step is induced and how 5' nucleases utilize the same intermediary step to recognize diverse range of substrates.

The team from KAUST's Division of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering employed a sophisticated single molecule imaging technique, Frster resonance energy transfer (smFRET), to capture "molecular movies" detailing the structure, dynamics, and reaction mechanisms occurring during this process. The KAUST scientists were able to build a timeline of up to seven intermediary steps before FEN1 commits to catalysis. Such information cannot be accessed through conventional approaches.

These findings will influence how researchers think about the mechanism of other members of 5' nucleases and provide a new concept as to how biological macromolecules can diversify their substrate specificity while maintaining a high degree of structural similarities.

Dr. Hamdan explained that the surprising finding is that FEN1 utilizes a highly complex mechanism that sequentially verifies all substrate features before inducing the superfamily unifying DNA bending intermediary. This sequential and multistep substrate recognition process provides a scaffold that allows different 5' nucleases to recognize different substrates and restrict the induction of DNA bending to the last common step. "We hope that our findings will serve as a base to design inhibitors against FEN1, whose expression is highly correlated with tumor aggressiveness," said Prof. Hamdan.

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About KAUST

See the original post:
Capturing Molecular Movies of DNA Replication and Repair