Latest Single-nucleotide polymorphism Stories

Genomic switches can predispose an individual to one set of autoimmune disorders but protect the same person against another set of them, scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine have found."Maybe we should stop considering all autoimmune diseases in one lumped category," said Atul Butte, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics and of biomedical informatics and director of the Center for Pediatric Bioinformatics at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. "It looks as...

REYKJAVIK, Iceland, December 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Scientists at deCODE genetics, Inc. (Nasdaq:DCGN) publish in the journal Nature the discovery of a version of a common single-letter variant in the sequence of the human genome (SNP) with a major impact on susceptibility to type 2 diabetes (T2D). The impact of the T2D variant is not only large, but unusual: if an individual inherits it from their father, the variant increases risk of T2D by more than 30% compared to those who...

Eighteen single-point genetic variations indicate risk of recurrence for early-stage head and neck cancer patients and their likelihood of developing a second type of cancer, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center reported at the American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference.The team examined 241 single nucleotide polymorphisms - variations of a single DNA building block in a gene - in eight genes involved in the...

An international research team has issued the most updated map of changes to the structure of human genomes.Writing in the journal Nature, researchers said the new map should provide others with a better approach to fighting human diseases.Researchers also reported the identification of 75 so-called "jumping genes," which are defined as regions of human genomes that can be found in more than one location.They used data compiled through scanning and comparing genomes of 450 people of European,...

REYKJAVIK, Iceland, September 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- - Findings Further Increase Power of DNA-Based Testing to Identify Men at Substantially Increased Risk, and Will be Integrated Into the deCODE ProstateCancer(TM) Test deCODE genetics (Nasdaq:DCGN) today announced that a team of its scientists and academic colleagues from Finland, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States have today published the discovery of four novel single-letter variations in the sequence of the...

A new study lays the groundwork for development of a cost-effective tool for studying the population structure and spread of Mycobacterium ulcerans, the causative agent of Buruli ulcer. Researchers at the Swiss Tropical Institute, Basel, Switzerland, and the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, Legon, Ghana, developed SNP typing assays to systematically profile genetic diversity among M. ulcerans isolates by sequencing and comparing the genomes of selected strains.The findings,...

Michigan Technological University researchers have linked three genes to the most common type of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), generally known as Lou Gehrig's disease.Shuanglin Zhang, who holds the Richard and Elizabeth Henes Professorship in Mathematical Sciences, leads the team of mathematicians that isolated the genes from the many thousands scattered throughout human DNA. He notes that their discovery does not mean an end to ALS, but it could provide scientists with valuable clues...

A third of the previously identified single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, associated with prostate cancer in men of European or African ancestry were also associated with prostate cancer in a Japanese population, according to a new study published online September 2 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.Genome-wide association studies have primarily been performed in populations of European ancestry, but little is known if the associations discovered in one population are...

In the chilling science fiction movie Gattaca, Ethan Hawke stars as a man with "inferior genes" who assumes another's genetic identity to escape a dead-end future. The 1997 film illustrates the very real fear swirling around today's genome research "” fear that private genetic information could be used negatively against us. Last year, after a published paper found serious security holes in the way DNA data is made publicly available, health institutes in the United States and across the...

A specific genetic region that has been increasingly identified as the strongest genetic link to psoriasis has an even more significant role in the chronic skin disease than has been suspected, University of Utah medical researchers show in a new study.In the Aug. 13 issue of PLoS Genetics, researchers in the U School of Medicine's Department of Dermatology confirm that the presence of HLA-Cw*0602, a gene variation or allele on chromosome 6 found to be associated with psoriasis by numerous...