The era of genoscopy

Gone are the days of horoscopy. Its time for genoscopy. For everyone out there, its wise to compare your genomes rather than horoscopes for compatibility, before marriage. You may end up on the safe side personally, but your kid will be the most affected one. Recently, I worked on some Agrawal patients from India........several of them; each belonging to a different unrelated family. When I looked at their genomes, what I found was interesting. The disease causing mutation was the same in all of them. They harbored the same mutation in one of their genes. This is called a founder mutation; a mutation inherited by several of the descendants form a common ancestor, perhaps long long ago. Even though the parents did not have the disorder, the kids got it, because each of the parent had one of their two copies of the gene mutated. The kids unfortunately inherited the mutated copies of the gene from each parent and ended up having both copies mutated and hence the disorder. Only if the couple got their genomes checked for compatibility, they would have known the risks involved. This is just an example, there are several other examples involving even devastating and fatal disorders. So, BETTER BE CAUTIOUS AND EDUCATED.

Congress Passes Small NIH Increase for 2012

As part of a large appropriations bill passed over the weekend to fund the federal government through the remainder of Fiscal Year 2012, the US Congress has passed a small funding increase of nearly $300 million for the National Institutes of Health.

Detecting Cancer Biomarkers through protein arrays

Joshua LaBaer from Arizona State University and Jonine Figueroa from National Cancer Institute have collaborated to apply NAPPA (Nucleic acid programmable protein array) technology to detect new autoantibody biomarkers for different cancers. NAPPA approach involves printing cDNA clones of known genes on an array slide. These cDNA clones are custom added an epitope tag at the C-terminus. An hour or two before the exposure of this slide to any patient sample for analysis, the slide in dipped in an expression extract to trigger in situ transcription and translation on the slide. The proteins thus synthesized are recognized by any autoantibodies in patient serum, suggesting what autoantibodies are being expressed in the patient; which can then be used as biomarkers of the cancer type.