NEWPORT, Ore. – Magellanic penguins have a high level of variation in genes associated with the ability to fight infectious disease, but a recent study found that the mechanism the penguins use to ensure that diversity is far from black and white. Found exclusively south of the equator in South America, Magellanic penguins assemble in large nesting colonies along the coasts of Argentina, Chile, and the Falkland Islands. They typically mate for life, producing clutches of two eggs that are cared for by both parents. While individual colonies can number in the millions ...

MINNEAPOLIS – New research shows that professional football players may be at a higher risk of death from diseases that damage the cells in the brain, such as Alzheimer's disease and ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), compared to the general U.S. population. The study is published in the September 5, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study included 3,439 players with an average age of 57 from the National Football League with at least five playing seasons from 1959-1988. Researchers reviewed death ...

The World Health Organization is about to roll out a new strategy for AIDS prevention in South Africa, a country where more than 5 million people are infected with HIV. Based on a mathematical model, the WHO predicts this strategy will completely eliminate HIV in South Africa within a decade. But not so fast, suggests a group of UCLA researchers. Their work challenges the proposed strategy by showing it could lead to several million individuals developing drug-resistant strains of HIV. And further, they say, it will cost billions of dollars more than the WHO has estimated. ...

Sleep disruptions may be among the earliest indicators of Alzheimer's disease, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report Sept. 5 in Science Translational Medicine. Working in a mouse model, the researchers found that when the first signs of Alzheimer's plaques appear in the brain, the normal sleep-wake cycle is significantly disrupted. "If sleep abnormalities begin this early in the course of human Alzheimer's disease, those changes could provide us with an easily detectable sign of pathology," says senior author David M. Holtzman, MD, ...

Population Council scientists have found that a vaginal ring releasing an anti-HIV drug can prevent the transmission of SHIV in macaques. This study provides the first efficacy data on the delivery of a microbicide from a vaginal ring, and indicates strong potential for the success of such rings in women. Microbicides are compounds that can be applied inside the vagina or rectum to protect against sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV. "This proof-of-concept study confirms that the investment in vaginal rings as a delivery system for HIV prevention is ...

Researchers at the University of Washington have determined that the majority of genetic changes associated with more than 400 common diseases and clinical traits affect the genome's regulatory circuitry. These are the regions of DNA that contain instructions dictating when and where genes are switched on or off. Most of these changes affect circuits that are active during early human development, when body tissues are most vulnerable. By creating extensive blueprints of the control circuitry, the research also exposed previously hidden connections between different ...

The hundreds of researchers working on the ENCODE project have revealed that much of what has been called 'junk DNA' in the human genome is actually a massive control panel with millions of switches regulating the activity of our genes. Without these switches, genes would not work – and mutations in these regions might lead to human disease. The new information delivered by ENCODE is so comprehensive and complex that it has given rise to a new publishing model in which electronic documents and datasets are interconnected. Just as the Human Genome Project revolutionised ...

Albatrosses leverage the energy of the wind to fly with essentially no mechanical cost to themselves, very rarely flapping their wings, and new work published Sep. 5 in the open access journal PLOS ONE offers insight into how exactly they accomplish this feat. The researchers, led by Gottfried Sachs of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen and Francesco Bonadonna of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), used advanced GPS tracking to determine that the energy gain during the albatross's "dynamic soaring" comes from a repeated oscillation consisting ...

Closer sleeping proximity between fathers and children is associated with a greater decrease in the father's testosterone level, with possible implications for parenting behavior. The full report is published Sep. 5 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. Fathers' testosterone levels have been associated with parenting behavior and involvement across species, with higher levels generally associated with lower parental involvement. The authors of the current study, led by Lee Gettler of the University of Notre Dame, studied 362 fathers in the Philippines to determine whether ...

The first integrated understanding of how the human genome functions will be published this week -- the triumphant result of a collaborative five-year project involving more than 440 researchers working in 32 labs worldwide. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project, known as ENCODE, will publish simultaneously on 6 September 2012 a massive number of scientific papers, including 1 main integrative paper and 5 others in Nature; 18 in Genome Research; 6 in Genome Biology; and other affiliated papers in Science, Cell, and other scientific journals. During the ENCODE study, ...

Within the genome, sex does matter Yale researchers studying the human genome say they can now tell how much "mom" and how much "dad" is genetically active in each of us. These gender-specific markers may not determine which parent can take credit — or the blame — for the successes or shortcomings of their offspring; however, they could help explain differences in human populations. "We can now track the relative genetic contribution of mom and dad," said Gerstein. All human beings are born with two copies of the genome — one from the mother and one from the father. ...

Deforestation can have a significant effect on tropical rainfall, new research confirms. The findings have potentially devastating impacts for people living in and near the Amazon and Congo forests. A team from the University of Leeds and the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology found that for the majority of the Earth's tropical land surface, air passing over extensive forests produces at least twice as much rain as air passing over little vegetation. In some cases these forests increased rainfall thousands of kilometres away. By combining observational data with predictions ...

Cambridge, MA. Wed. September 5, 2012 – Most of the DNA alterations that are tied to disease do not alter protein-coding genes, but rather the "switches" that control them. Characterizing these switches is one of many goals of the ENCODE project – a sweeping, international effort to create a compendium of all of the working parts of the human genome that have not been well studied or well understood. The function of the vast majority of the human genome has remained largely unknown, but the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, launched in 2003, set out to change ...

WORCESTER, MA — The first comprehensive decoding and annotation of the human genome is being published today by the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, an international consortium of scientists from 32 institutions, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The groundbreaking ENCODE discovery appears in a set of 30 papers in Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology. Using data generated from 1,649 experiments – with prominent contributions from the labs of UMMS professors Job Dekker and Zhiping Weng – the group has assigned biochemical functions ...

Doctors are calling for improved safety warnings and childproof packaging for laundry and dishwasher detergent liquitabs, following a cluster of incidents in which toddlers have inadvertently swallowed the capsules. The five cases, all of which occurred within the space of 18 months, are reported online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. The youngest child was just 10 months old, and all the children were under the age of 2. All five children were admitted to one hospital in Glasgow as emergencies, emitting a high pitched wheeze (stridor) indicative of a blockage ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--A massive international collaboration has enabled scientists to assign specific functions for 80 percent of the human genome, providing new insights into the mechanisms of gene regulation and giving biomedical researchers a solid genetic foundation for understanding how the body works in health and disease. The results of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project are described in a coordinated set of 30 papers published in several journals on September 5, 2012. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have operated the Data Coordination ...

Most professional English football teams don't comply with international guidelines on concussion among players, which ensure they are safe to return to play, indicates research published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The Consensus in Sport (CIS) guidelines were developed following the first international conference on concussion in sport in 2001. This was convened by the International Ice Hockey Federation, FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association), and the International Olympic Committee Medical Commission in recognition of the inevitability ...

Tests to screen for "silent" neck artery narrowing in a bid to curb the risk of a stroke result in many unnecessary and costly surgical procedures, and ultimately save very few lives, concludes an editorial in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery. In 2-6% of European men aged 60 plus, the major arteries supplying the brain (carotid arteries) are narrowed by 50-99%. This condition, termed carotid stenosis or atherosclerosis, accounts for 10-15% of strokes (data not in paper). Carotid atherosclerosis is commonest in those with mild peripheral arterial disease in ...

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – Most people understand genes to be specific segments of DNA that determine traits or diseases that are inherited. Textbooks suggest that genes are copied ("transcribed") into RNA molecules, which are then used as templates for making protein – the highly diverse set of molecules that act as building blocks and engines of our cells. The truth, it now appears, is not so simple. As part of a huge collaborative effort called ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements), a research team led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Thomas Gingeras, ...

The locations of millions of DNA 'switches' that dictate how, when, and where in the body different genes turn on and off have been identified by a research team led by the University of Washington in Seattle. Genes make up only 2 percent of the human genome and were easy to spot, but the on/off switches controlling those genes were encrypted within the remaining 98 percent of the genome. Without these switches, called regulatory DNA, genes are inert. Researchers around the world have been focused on identifying regulatory DNA to understand how the genome works. ...

Boston, MA – Each year, nearly 2 million people die from tuberculosis – a treatable disease that has been brought under control in the United States, but continues to ravage other parts of the world. This health inequity should prompt a complete rethinking of the way tuberculosis is fought on a global level, argue Salmaan Keshavjee, MD, PhD, and Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). Their argument appears in an essay published September 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine. "The global approach to fighting tuberculosis has been lacking," ...

ENCODE, an international research project led by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), has produced and analyzed 1649 data sets designed to annotate functional elements of the entire human genome. Data on transcription starting sites (TSS) contributed by a research team at the RIKEN Omics Science Center provided key anchor points linking the epigenetic status of genes observed at the 5' end directly to their RNA output. The ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project aims to delineate all functional elements encoded in the human genome. Thirty-two institutes ...

This press release is available in German. Physicists at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have achieved quantum teleportation over a record distance of 143 km. The experiment is a major step towards satellite-based quantum communication. The results have now been published in "Nature" (Advance Online Publication/AOP). An international team led by the Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger has successfully transmitted quantum states between the two Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife, over a distance of 143 km. The previous record, set ...

Cambridge, Mass. - September 5, 2012 - A team of experts in mechanics, materials science, and tissue engineering at Harvard have created an extremely stretchy and tough gel that may pave the way to replacing damaged cartilage in human joints. Called a hydrogel, because its main ingredient is water, the new material is a hybrid of two weak gels that combine to create something much stronger. Not only can this new gel stretch to 21 times its original length, but it is also exceptionally tough, self-healing, and biocompatible—a valuable collection of attributes that opens ...

Genome Research publishes online and in print today a special issue dedicated to The ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) Project, whose goal is to characterize all functional elements in the human genome. Since the completion of the pilot phase of the project in 2007, covering 1% of the genome, The ENCODE Consortium has fanned out across the genome to study function and regulation on an unprecedented scale. This special issue presents novel findings, methodologies, and resources from ENCODE that bring extensive insight to gene regulation and set the stage for future ...