Daily Archives: September 1, 2014

Human Genetics - The Complexity of Living Cells Debunks Evolution.
Dr Mark Harwood explains human genetics and the probabilities of life evolving from nothing.

By: Max Bauer

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Human Genetics - The Complexity of Living Cells Debunks Evolution. - Video

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

28-Aug-2014

Contact: Kelly Husser khusser@faseb.org 301-634-7109 Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

Bethesda, MD FASEB MARC (Maximizing Access to Research Careers) Program has announced the travel award recipients for the American Society of Human Genetics from October 18 22, 2014 in San Diego, California. These awards are meant to promote the entry of students, post doctorates and scientists from underrepresented groups into the mainstream of the basic science community and to encourage the participation of young scientists at the American Society of Human Genetics. This year MARC conferred 16 awards totaling $29,600.

The FASEB MARC Program is funded by a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health. A primary goal of the MARC Program is to increase the number and competitiveness of underrepresented groups engaged in biomedical and behavioral research. The following participants have been selected to receive a FASEB MARC Travel Award:

POSTER/ORAL PRESENTER (FASEB MARC PROGRAM)

FACULTY/MENTOR & STUDENT/MENTEE (FASEB MARC PROGRAM)

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FASEB is composed of 27 societies with more than 120,000 members, making it the largest coalition of biomedical research associations in the United States. Our mission is to advance health and welfare by promoting progress and education in biological and biomedical sciences through service to our member societies and collaborative advocacy.

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MARC travel awards announced for: American Society of Human Genetics 2014 Annual Meeting

The Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council (MRC), and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) have announced this morning that an Ebola vaccine developed in the U.S. will enter human safety trials in the UK as early as September. The consortium is devoting 2.8 million to the effort.

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an arm of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, held a press conference this morning to discuss the specifics about the U.S. vaccine. The FDA has given the green light to begin testing here.

The vaccine was designed by Nancy J. Sullivan, Ph.D., chief of the Biodefense Research Section in NIAIDs Vaccine Research Center (VRC). She worked with other collaborators in the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and scientists at the Swiss-Italian biotechnology company,Okairos, acquired byGlaxoSmithKlinein May, 2013.

Ebola virus particles, colored digitally, emerging from a type of monkey epithelial cell line (Vero) grown in the laboratory. Credit: CDC Public Health Image Library

The GSK/NIAID vaccine has been designed to produce a protective immune reaction toward the surface protein on the Zaire Ebola and Sudan Ebola viruses, a protein required for the virus to normally infect humans. Because its directed at two versions of the viral protein, its called a bivalent vaccine.

In science, you never know

While the vaccine has proven to protect non-human primates from Ebola infection and produced high levels of immunogenic responses, the phase 1 trials are being conducted to ensure that any untoward reactions in humans are detected and the production of protective antibodies proceeds as observed in non-human primates.

NIAID will be starting with typical caution for the first time a vaccine is tested in healthy human volunteers. The trial, termed VRC 207, will ultimately enroll 20 healthy, adult human volunteers (age 18 to 50 years) and evaluate the safety of the virus nine times over a 48-week period and, said Fauci, whether it generates an immune response in healthy adults that, based on our animal studies, could predict effectiveness in preventing the acquisition of Ebola infection.

The volunteers will be split into two groups to receive a high or low dose of the vaccine. The trial will be staged so that small groups of volunteers receive the vaccine at a time, with the first three volunteers to be dosed starting next week at the NIH Clinical Research Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Those three volunteers will be followed for three days before any other volunteers are injected.

We expect to be able to report initial safety and immunogenicity data from this study by the end of this calendar year, said Dr. Fauci.

Read more from the original source:
GSK/NIAID Ebola Vaccines To Enter US, UK Human Safety Trials

Researchers analyzing human, fly, and worm genomes have found that these species have a number of key genomic processes in common, reflecting their shared ancestry. The findings, appearing Aug. 28, 2014, in the journal Nature, offer insights into embryonic development, gene regulation and other biological processes vital to understanding human biology and disease.

The studies highlight the data generated by the modENCODE Project and the ENCODE Project, both supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health. Integrating data from the three species, the model organism ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (modENCODE) Consortium studied how gene expression patterns and regulatory proteins that help determine cell fate often share common features. Investigators also detailed the similar ways in which the three species use protein packaging to compact DNA into the cell nucleus and to regulate genome function by controlling access to DNA.

Launched in 2007, the goal of modENCODE is to create a comprehensive catalog of functional elements in the fruit fly and roundworm genomes for use by the research community. Such elements include genes that code for proteins, non-protein-coding genes and regulatory elements that control gene expression. The current work builds on initial catalogs published in 2010. The modENCODE projects complement the work being done by the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project, which is building a comprehensive catalog of functional elements in the human and mouse genomes.

"The modENCODE investigators have provided a valuable resource for researchers worldwide," said NHGRI Director Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D. "The insights gained about the workings of model organisms' genomes greatly help to inform our understanding of human biology."

"One way to describe and understand the human genome is through comparative genomics and studying model organisms," said Mark Gerstein, Ph.D., Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and the lead author on one of the papers. "The special thing about the worm and fly is that they are very distant from humans evolutionarily, so finding something conserved across all three -- human, fly and worm -- tells us it is a very ancient, fundamental process."

In one study, scientists led by Dr. Gerstein and others, analyzed human, fly and worm transcriptomes, the collection of gene transcripts (or readouts) in a genome. They used large amounts of gene expression data generated in the ENCODE and modENCODE projects -- including more than 67 billion gene sequence readouts -- to discover gene expression patterns shared by all three species, particularly for developmental genes.

Investigators showed that the ways in which DNA is packaged in the cell are similar in many respects, and, in many cases, the species share programs for turning on and off genes in a coordinated manner. More specifically, they used gene expression patterns to match the stages of worm and fly development and found sets of genes that parallel each other in their usage. They also found the genes specifically expressed in the worm and fly embryos are re-expressed in the fly pupae, the stage between larva and adult.

The researchers found that in all three organisms, the gene expression levels for both protein-coding and non-protein-coding genes could be quantitatively predicted from chromatin features at the promoters of genes. A gene's promoter tells the cell's machinery where to begin copying DNA into RNA, which can be used to make proteins. DNA is packaged into chromatin in cells, and changes in this packaging can regulate gene function.

"Our findings open whole new worlds for understanding gene expression and how we think about the role of transcription," said co-senior author Susan Celniker, Ph.D., Head, Department of Genome Dynamics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California. "modENCODE has been transformative," she added. "It has helped set the standard for the types of data that should be generated and catalogued."

Another group of scientists investigated how chromatin is organized and how it influences gene regulation in the three species. Using both modENCODE and ENCODE data, scientists compared patterns of modifications in chromatin that are needed for the cell to access the DNA inside, and the changes in DNA replication patterns as a result of these modifications. The investigators discovered that many features of chromatin were similar in all three species.

See the article here:
Shared biology in human, fly and worm genomes: Powerful commonalities in biological activity, regulation