Daily Archives: February 23, 2015

COD Advanced Warfare: DNA BOMB Supply Drops #1
In this video I get a DNA Bomb on the new maps of call of duty advanced warfare it was awesome it is like a Nuke like back in the days but anyway I do show off some Supply Drops and it was...

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COD Advanced Warfare: DNA BOMB & Supply Drops #1 - Video

By Melody Schreiber February 23 at 2:57 PM

Four years ago, Candra Alston and her 3-year-old daughter, Malaysia Boykin, were murdered inside their South Carolina apartment. Police in Columbia collected DNA at the scene, but the investigation stalled.

Prime-time crime shows would have you believe DNA samples can convict the guilty and clear the innocent, but real life is more complicated. In order to find an assailant, the DNA has to match either a previous offender in the FBIs CODIS database or a sample from one of the victims acquaintances. When it doesnt, the investigation hits a wall. In the South Carolina case, police gathered 150 DNA samples and conducted 200 interviews with likely suspects and still nothing.

Now the Columbia police are experimenting with a new technology that uses tiny amounts of DNA to create a computer-generated illustration of their suspect. Snapshot, a program developed by a Reston, Va., company called Parabon NanoLabs, goes beyond simply listing physical attributes eye color, hair color, ethnicity and facial features and creates a 3-D image of what the killer might look like. The police in South Carolina hope that publicly releasing the suspects image and description will bring up fresh leads in a stale case.

Dabrien Dabe Murphy, the senior solutions architect at Parabon, sits in front of three monitors in a little office on the fourth floor of an unremarkable Reston office building not exactly the first place that comes to mind when you think of a lab. With a few keystrokes, Murphy brings up a revolving 3-D image the back of a head. Another few taps and a face attaches itself along the hairline. The face is a mans: olive skin, greenish eyes, full lips.

Murphy has fed DNA markers, linked to certain facial attributes, into 3-D imaging software to create what he calls a composition. It produces a somewhat distorted image where the face meets the rest of the 3-D model.

Theres a little bit of, okay, manual manipulation to make this not look quite so Frankensteined, Murphy explains. Using his cursor to adjust points and axes in the imaging software, Murphy smooths out the hairline and jaw where the projected face attaches itself to the head.

According to the markers Murphy feeds into the imaging software, the man on the screen is of Northwest African ancestry, with hazel or green eyes; black or brown hair; and few or no freckles. This mans DNA was publicly available, so theyre using it to test their model; they know, from the data included with the DNA, that he is Algerian. The trait predictions come with varying levels of confidence; Parabons scientists are 73.4 percent sure that their skin color prediction is accurate, but they are 94.7 percent confident in the subjects eye color.

All this from 9.6 nanograms of DNA. Thats less than 0.00000001 grams, an amount so small, its hard to compare to anything else.

Snapshot combs through a genotype, searching for significant markers and clusters that might indicate physical attributes and removing unimportant variables.

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Police turn to new DNA-powered technology in hopes of finding killer

The New York Times; Images and renderings by Mark D. Shriver/Penn State University Individuals' faces compared with Dr. Shriver's computer-generated DNA predictions. See more comparisons.

There were no known eyewitnesses to the murder of a young woman and her 3-year-old daughter four years ago. No security cameras caught a figure coming or going.

Nonetheless, the police in Columbia, S.C., last month released a sketch of a possible suspect. Rather than an artists rendering based on witness descriptions, the face was generated by a computer relying solely on DNA found at the scene of the crime.

It may be the first time a suspects face has been put before the public in this way, but it will not be the last. Investigators are increasingly able to determine the physical characteristics of crime suspects from the DNA they leave behind, providing what could become a powerful new tool for law enforcement.

Already genetic sleuths can determine a suspects eye and hair color fairly accurately. It is also possible, or might soon be, to predict skin color, freckling, baldness, hair curliness, tooth shape and age.

Computers may eventually be able to match faces generated from DNA to those in a database of mug shots. Even if it does not immediately find the culprit, the genetic witness, so to speak, can be useful, researchers say.

That at least narrows down the suspects, said Susan Walsh, an assistant professor of biology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who recently won a $1.1 million grant from the Department of Justice to develop such tools.

But forensic DNA phenotyping, as it is called, is also raising concerns. Some scientists question the accuracy of the technology, especially its ability to recreate facial images. Others say use of these techniques could exacerbate racial profiling among law enforcement agencies and infringe on privacy.

This is another of these areas where the technology is ahead of the popular debate and discussion, said Erin Murphy, a professor of law at New York University.

DNA, of course, has been used for more than two decades to hunt for suspects or to convict or exonerate people. But until now, that meant matching a suspects DNA to that found at the crime scene, or trying to find a match in a government database.

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Building Face, and a Case, on DNA

Imagine: You pop a pill into your mouth and swallow it. It dissolves, releasing tiny particles that are absorbed and cause only cancerous cells to secrete a specific protein into your bloodstream. Two days from now, a finger-prick blood sample will expose whether you've got cancer and even give a rough idea of its extent.

That's a highly futuristic concept. But its realization may be only years, not decades, away.

Stanford University School of Medicine investigators administered a customized genetic construct consisting of tiny rings of DNA, called DNA minicircles, to mice. The scientists then showed that mice with tumors produced a substance that tumor-free mice didn't make. The substance was easily detected 48 hours later by a simple blood test.

A paper describing the findings of this proof-of-principle study will be published online Feb. 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The technique has the potential to apply to a broad range of cancers, so someday clinicians might be able not only to detect tumors, monitor the effectiveness of cancer therapies and guide the developments of anti-tumor drugs, but -- importantly -- to screen symptom-free populations for nascent tumors that might have otherwise gone undetected until they became larger and much tougher to treat.

Triggering an unambiguous biomarker

The hunt for cancer biomarkers -- substances whose presence in an individual's blood or urine flags a probable tumor -- is nothing new, said the study's senior author, Sanjiv "Sam" Gambhir, professor and chair of radiology and director of the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection. High blood levels of prostate-specific antigen, for example, can signify prostate cancer, and there are also biomarkers that sometimes signal ovarian and colorectal cancer, he said.

But while various tumor types naturally secrete characteristic substances into the blood, the secreted substance is typically specific to the tumor type, with each requiring its own separate test. Complicating matters, these substances are also quite often made in healthy tissues, so a positive test result doesn't absolutely mean a person actually has cancer. Or a tumor -- especially a small one -- simply may not secrete enough of the trademark substance to be detectable.

Gambhir's team appears to have found a way to force any of numerous tumor types to produce a biomarker whose presence in the blood of mice unambiguously signifies cancer, because none of the rodents' tissues -- cancerous or otherwise -- would normally be making it.

This biomarker is a protein called secreted embryonic alkaline phosphatase. SEAP is naturally produced in human embryos as they form and develop, but it's not present in adults.

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Customized DNA rings aid early cancer detection in mice, study finds

By Melody Schreiber February 23 at 2:57 PM

Four years ago, Candra Alston and her 3-year-old daughter, Malaysia Boykin, were murdered inside their South Carolina apartment. Police in Columbia collected DNA at the scene, but the investigation stalled.

Prime-time crime shows would have you believe DNA samples can convict the guilty and clear the innocent, but real life is more complicated. In order to find an assailant, the DNA has to match either a previous offender in the FBIs CODIS database or a sample from one of the victims acquaintances. When it doesnt, the investigation hits a wall. In the South Carolina case, police gathered 150 DNA samples and conducted 200 interviews with likely suspects and still nothing.

Now the Columbia police are experimenting with a new technology that uses tiny amounts of DNA to create a computer-generated illustration of their suspect. Snapshot, a program developed by a Reston, Va., company called Parabon NanoLabs, goes beyond simply listing physical attributes eye color, hair color, ethnicity and facial features and creates a 3-D image of what the killer might look like. The police in South Carolina hope that publicly releasing the suspects image and description will bring up fresh leads in a stale case.

Dabrien Dabe Murphy, the senior solutions architect at Parabon, sits in front of three monitors in a little office on the fourth floor of an unremarkable Reston office building not exactly the first place that comes to mind when you think of a lab. With a few keystrokes, Murphy brings up a revolving 3-D image the back of a head. Another few taps and a face attaches itself along the hairline. The face is a mans: olive skin, greenish eyes, full lips.

Murphy has fed DNA markers, linked to certain facial attributes, into 3-D imaging software to create what he calls a composition. It produces a somewhat distorted image where the face meets the rest of the 3-D model.

Theres a little bit of, okay, manual manipulation to make this not look quite so Frankensteined, Murphy explains. Using his cursor to adjust points and axes in the imaging software, Murphy smooths out the hairline and jaw where the projected face attaches itself to the head.

According to the markers Murphy feeds into the imaging software, the man on the screen is of Northwest African ancestry, with hazel or green eyes; black or brown hair; and few or no freckles. This mans DNA was publicly available, so theyre using it to test their model; they know, from the data included with the DNA, that he is Algerian. The trait predictions come with varying levels of confidence; Parabons scientists are 73.4 percent sure that their skin color prediction is accurate, but they are 94.7 percent confident in the subjects eye color.

All this from 9.6 nanograms of DNA. Thats less than 0.00000001 grams, an amount so small, its hard to compare to anything else.

Snapshot combs through a genotype, searching for significant markers and clusters that might indicate physical attributes and removing unimportant variables.

See the original post:
New technology generates photo illustration from a persons DNA

Injecting mouse embryos with a human DNA sequence leads to a marked increase in brain size -- and may provide insights into Alzheimer's.

Mouse embryo injected with HARE5. Gene actvity is stained blue. Duke University/Silver Lab

The human genetic code is very similar to the genetic code of our closest living relative -- the chimpanzee -- sharing around 95 percent. Of all the differences, however, one is particularly interesting: the human brain is a lot bigger than the brain of a chimp. The brain of a chimp weighs, on average, 384 grams, whereas a human brain is more than triple that, at 1,352 grams.

Although it's not brain size alone that accounts for human intelligence, it certainly plays a pretty important role -- and now, researchers at Duke University have identified the DNA sequence that may be responsible for that particular evolutionary deviation.

How? By using mouse embryos.

The DNA sequence, called HARE5, is a gene activity regulator shown to markedly increase the size of a mouse embryo's brain when injected into the embryo. Compared to a mouse embryo injected with chimpanzee HARE5, the mouse embryo's brain grew 12 percent larger.

"I think we've just scratched the surface, in terms of what we can gain from this sort of study," said Debra Silver, an assistant professor of molecular genetics and microbiology in the Duke University Medical School. "There are some other really compelling candidates that we found that may also lead us to a better understanding of the uniqueness of the human brain."

HARE5 is what is known as an "enhancer", belonging to a group called "human-accelerated regulatory enhancers", including HARE1 through to HARE6. Enhancers are short pieces of DNA inside every genome that control the activity of genes.

To locate the DNA that might influence brain development, the team screened databases of genomic data from humans and chimps, looking for enhancers expressed primarily in the brain tissue early in development, but that also differed between the two species. Of the 106 candidates, the HARE group were near to genes believed to be involved in brain development.

HARE5 was the strongest candidate -- it's located chromosomally near Frizzled8, a molecular pathway indicated in brain development and disease. The team also found that Frizzled8 and HARE5 make physical contact in brain tissue.

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Human DNA gives mice bigger brains

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Newswise Researchers at McGill University have developed a new, low-cost method to build DNA nanotubes block by block a breakthrough that could help pave the way for scaffolds made from DNA strands to be used in applications such as optical and electronic devices or smart drug-delivery systems.

Many researchers, including the McGill team, have previously constructed nanotubes using a method that relies on spontaneous assembly of DNA in solution. The new technique, reported today in Nature Chemistry, promises to yield fewer structural flaws than the spontaneous-assembly method. The building-block approach also makes it possible to better control the size and patterns of the DNA structures, the scientists report.

Just like a Tetris game, where we manipulate the game pieces with the aim of creating a horizontal line of several blocks, we can now build long nanotubes block by block, said Amani Hariri, a PhD student in McGills Department of Chemistry and lead author of the study. By using a fluorescence microscope we can further visualize the formation of the tubes at each stage of assembly, as each block is tagged with a fluorescent compound that serves as a beacon. We can then count the number of blocks incorporated in each tube as it is constructed.

This new technique was made possible by the development in recent years of single-molecule microscopy, which enables scientists to peer into the nano-world by turning the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. (That groundbreaking work won three U.S.- and German-based scientists the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.)

Hariris research is jointly supervised by chemistry professors Gonzalo Cosa and Hanadi Sleiman, who co-authored the new study. Cosas research group specializes in single-molecule fluorescence techniques, while Sleimans uses DNA chemistry to design new materials for drug delivery and diagnostic tools.

The custom-built assembly technique developed through this collaboration gives us the ability to monitor the nanotubes as were building them, and see their structure, robustness and morphology, Cosa said.

We wanted to control the nanotubes lengths and features one-by-one, said Sleiman, who holds the Canada Research Chair in DNA Nanoscience. The resulting designer nanotubes, she adds, promise to be far cheaper to produce on a large scale than those created with so-called DNA origami, another innovative technique for using DNA as a nanoscale construction material.

Funding for the research was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, NanoQubec, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Fonds de recherch du Qubec Nature et technologies. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Building Tailor-Made DNA Nanotubes Step by Step