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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 24, 2015 at 8:37am

Some interesting news that says to get better research results more than 50 scientists have created a website to help biologists avoid poor-quality chemical reagents that undermine experiments in molecular biology and drug discovery.
http://www.chemicalprobes.org/
Chemical probes are small molecules designed to bind to a specific protein and disrupt its function. They are valuable tools for biologists trying to find out what a particular protein does in a cell, or for drug-discoverers gauging whether interfering with a function could form the basis of a therapy. But probes often interfere with unintended proteins, and their reliability can vary by cell type and by species. That can lead scientists who rely on such probes to make—and publish—unwarranted conclusions.
Unreliable probes have earlier led to thousands of papers with uninterpretable results as well as a failed clinical trials.
The new portal will recommend probes for use with particular proteins as well as specify recommended experimental systems and concentrations at which to use the reagents.
http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-unite-to-warn-against-flawed-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 24, 2015 at 8:09am

Genes influence academic ability across all subjects
Scientists have shown that the genes influencing numerical skills are the same ones that determine abilities in reading, arts and humanities.

A recent study suggests that if you have an academic Achilles heel, environmental factors such as a teaching are more likely to be to blame.

The findings add to growing evidence that school performance has a large heritable component, with around 60% of the differences in pupil’s GCSE results being explained by genetic factors.
Although scientists are yet to pinpoint specific genes, the latest work, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that the same ones are involved across subjects.

''Pleiotropy across academic subjects at the end of compulsory education''
http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150723/srep11713/full/srep11713.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 23, 2015 at 7:32am

This is another magic of science: Removing cataracts without surgery! The “fog” often seen by patients who have cataracts is a glob of broken proteins, stuck together in a malfunctioning clump. When healthy, these proteins, called crystallins, help the eye’s lens keep its structure and transparency. But as humans and animals alike get older, these crystallin proteins start to come unglued and lose their ability to function. Then they clump together and form a sheathlike obstruction in the lens, causing the signature “steamy glass” vision that accompanies cataracts. Currently, the only treatment for cataracts is surgery—lasers or scalpels cut away the molecular grout that builds in the eye as cataracts develop, and surgeons sometimes replace the lens. But now, a team of scientists and ophthalmologists has tested a solution in dogs that may be able to dissolve the cataract right out of the eye’s lens. And the solution is itself a solution: a steroid-based eye drop.
A research team led by University of California (UC), San Diego, molecular biologist Ling Zhao came up with the eye drop idea after finding that children with a genetically inherited form of cataracts shared a mutation that stopped the production of lanosterol, an important steroid in the body. When their parents did not have the same mutation, the adults produced lanosterol and had no cataracts.

So the researchers wondered: What if lanosterol helped prevent or reduce cataracts? The team tested a lanosterol-laden solution in three separate experiments. First, they used human lens cells to test how effectively lanosterol shrank lab models of cataracts. They saw a significant decrease. Then, they progressed to rabbits suffering from cataracts. At the end of the 6-day experiment, 11 of 13 rabbits had gone from having severe or significant cataracts to mild cataracts or no cataracts at all. Finally, the team moved on to dogs, using a group of seven, including black Labs, Queensland Heelers, and Miniature Pinschers with naturally occurring cataracts. The dogs responded just as the researchers hoped to the lanosterol solution, which was given in the form of both eye injections and eye drops. The dogs’ lenses showed the same type of dissolving pattern as the human and rabbit lens cells.
The improvement was remarkable—researchers could tell just by looking at the dogs’ eyes that the cataracts had decreased. But the exact mechanism of how lanosterol manages to disperse the mass of proteins remains unknown.
http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2015/07/eye-drops-could-dissolve-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 22, 2015 at 7:03am

Our obligations — work, family and friends — often don’t line up with when our bodies want to sleep. Scientists call this phenomenon, the result of that shift in sleep schedule, social jetlag. It may also be associated with wider waistlines. As we learn more about how our body clocks work, it might help to think about how our own schedules can shift.

Social jetlag isn’t just about being groggy. Using a group of more than 1,000 New Zealanders from the town of Dunedin, followed throughout their lives and questioned regularly about their health, Parsons and other scientists showed that as little as a two-hour difference between weekday and weekend sleep schedules was associated with a higher body mass index, compared with people with no social jetlag. “It was an additional two [kilograms] of fat mass at age 38,” Parsons says. The authors published the work on January 20 in the International Journal of Obesity.

Social jetlag, obesity and metabolic disorder: investigation in a cohort study.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25601363

'Living against our internal clock' may contribute to metabolic dysfunction and its consequences. Further research aimed at understanding that the physiology and social features of social jetlag may inform obesity prevention and have ramifications for policies and practices that contribute to increased social jetlag, such as work schedules and daylight savings time.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 20, 2015 at 6:19am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 20, 2015 at 5:25am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 18, 2015 at 12:46pm

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 18, 2015 at 11:38am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 18, 2015 at 11:31am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 17, 2015 at 7:04am

Big Data: Astronomical or Genomical?
Genetics is poised to overtake astronomy, YouTube and Twitter as a data-generating champion, Michael Schatz, a quantitative geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and colleagues say. Challenges for collecting, analyzing, storing and sharing genetic data are already at least on par with some of the other most demanding big data endeavors, the researchers report July 7 in PLOS Biology.

The amount of genetic data doubles about every seven months. By 2025, researchers may have deciphered, or sequenced, 100 million to 2 billion human genomes — each the full set of genetic instructions for a person and each containing more than 3 billion DNA bases. Researchers are also compiling genetic data from thousands of species of microbes, animals and plants. No one knows for sure how much genetic information is currently available; thousands of laboratories around the world have DNA sequencing machines and most of the data are not yet in public databases.
If the doubling trend continues, genetics will soon catch up to radio astronomy’s vast data collections, Schatz says. He proposes that “genomical” may one day replace “astronomical” as an expression of gargantuan proportions. “Whether people will adopt ‘genomical,’ only time will tell,” he says.

Abstract

Genomics is a Big Data science and is going to get much bigger, very soon, but it is not known whether the needs of genomics will exceed other Big Data domains. Projecting to the year 2025, we compared genomics with three other major generators of Big Data: astronomy, YouTube, and Twitter. Our estimates show that genomics is a “four-headed beast”—it is either on par with or the most demanding of the domains analyzed here in terms of data acquisition, storage, distribution, and analysis. We discuss aspects of new technologies that will need to be developed to rise up and meet the computational challenges that genomics poses for the near future. Now is the time for concerted, community-wide planning for the “genomical” challenges of the next decade.

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbi...

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