Rutgers geneticist Tara Matise and her colleagues have produced a map that will help pinpoint the genes linked to such serious diseases as diabetes, high blood pressure and schizophrenia.

This linkage map is based on the amount of the interaction or recombination taking place among nearly 3,000 genetic markers whose positions are known. The markers used for the map are single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – the variations of a gene that people may carry at one point on their DNA.

UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas researchers have discovered a tumor-suppressor gene that, in fruit flies, simultaneously restricts cell proliferation and promotes cell death, a process that may also play an important role in the genesis of cancer in humans.

Removal of the gene, hippo, resulted in tumor formation in every organ of the fruit fly. The findings, which are currently online, will appear in an upcoming issue of Cell.

“This is one of the few genes that has been d

Small head circumference at birth, followed by a sudden and excessive increase in head circumference during the first year of life, has been linked to development of autism by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital and Health Center, San Diego. Autism spectrum disorder occurs in one out of every 160 children and is among the more common and serious of neurological disorders of early childhood.

Published in the July

Human papillomavirus 16 (HPV16), the virus responsible for approximately half of all cervical cancers, appears to be better at dodging the immune system than other HPV types, according to a large study of HIV-positive women in the July 16 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The findings may help explain why HPV16 plays such a major role in causing cervical cancer in the general population.

Whereas other HPV types have a lower prevalence and incidence among women wi

Genetics causes some men to test higher on the blood test for prostate cancer – even when they don’t have the disease – report researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and colleagues in the July 16 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The discovery could lead to more accurate testing and fewer unnecessary biopsies, said Scott D. Cramer, Ph.D., lead researcher, from Wake Forest.

“Up to 20 percent of men may have genetic variants that ca

In the July 15 issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Ambrose Cheung and colleagues at Dartmouth School of Medicine in New Hampshire, USA, report that salicylic acid (SAL), the major metabolite of aspirin, downregulates two Staphylococcus aureus genes key to this organism’s pathogenesis.

Over 100 years have passed since S. aureus was first described as the organism responsible for causing sepsis and abscesses. Today it remains a leading cause of serious infections such a

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by joint destruction. It has been suggested that the extracellular matrix protein osteopontin (OPN), which is expressed by a number of different mediators of the immune response, may facilitate this destruction.

In the July 15 issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Nobuchika Yamamoto and colleagues from the Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Company in Japan, provide important new evidence indicating a role for OPN in

Routine blood tests given to people suspected of having a heart attack can also reliably measure the risk of heart disease in people on dialysis awaiting a kidney transplant, even though they have no symptoms of heart disease. That’s according to a team of researchers led by a University of Maryland cardiologist. Their study is published in the July 16, 2003 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The tests, which measure troponin T and C-reactive protein, appea

Imagine being able to quickly detect and diagnose blood vessel growth in cancerous tumors, and even predict how fast the tumors might metastasize or spread. Researchers at the University of Virginia Health System are doing just that in animal models using millions of tiny microbubbles injected into the bloodstream, coupled with contrast-enhanced ultrasound, an inexpensive and widely-used technique using sound waves to “see” inside the body.

Their findings are published in the July 22

Yale researcher M. Marc Abreu, M.D., has identified an area of the brain he calls the brain temperature tunnel, which transmits brain temperature to an area of skin and has the potential to prevent death from heat stroke and hypothermia, and detect infectious diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Abreu, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ophthalmology at Yale School of Medicine, found that a small area of skin near the eyes and the nose is the point of

A Yale researcher who invented a test to determine whether a woman’s endometrium (uterine lining) is healthy and ready for embryo implantation has identified two new biochemical markers that improve assessment of the endometrium.

The endometrial function test (EFT®) was created by Harvey J. Kliman, M.D., a research scientist in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the Yale School of Medicine. An abnormal EFT is associated with pregnancy failure, whil

With 15,000 tons produced each year for batteries, alloys, and pigments, the heavy metal cadmium is one of the most serious environmental pollutants. Chronic exposure can induce kidney damage and bone disease and is thought to cause cancer. A study in the August issue of Nature Medicine now shows that cadmium mimics the effects of estrogen, and suggests that even at relatively low doses cadmium might have wide-ranging effects on the body.

Mary Beth Martin and colleagues report that,

Remain a hematopoetic stem cell or become a specialized blood cell?

Hematopoietic stem cells, the mother of all blood cells, face a fundamental dilemma in their lives.

Each must either remain a hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) by renewing itself or it must transform into one of eight specialized types of blood cells, such as a red blood cell, a white blood cell or a platelet.

Until recently, scientists didn’t know how the essential cells, which exist in limited a

UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas researchers have taken the first step in defining the sites in human genes most prone to mutation, which eventually could lead to discovery of the genetic bases of many human diseases.

Their work will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Gene and is currently available online.

Dr. Harold “Skip” Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine, and his colleagues made their discovery while mining databases of coding single nucle

’Lizards gone wild’

Despite social notions of race, human populations around the world are genetically so similar that geneticists find no different sub-species among them. The genetic continuity of human populations is the exception rather than the rule for most animal species, however.

Richard Glor, graduate evolutionary biology student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has found extensive genetic differentiation among populations of numero

’The brain’s Timex’

Getting over jet lag may be as simple as changing the temperature –your brain temperature, that is.

That’s a theory proposed by Erik Herzog, Ph.D. assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Herzog has found that the biological clocks of rats and mice respond directly to temperature changes.

Biological clocks, which drive circadian rhythms, are found in almost every living organis