Genetics will not explain Newtown

The tragedy in Connecticut last week shook all of us to our core, angering us, and pushing us all to find fault somewhere to explain the devastation. As a country, we have pointed fingers at guns, legislatures, school security and mental health care — anything that could help us make sense of this horrid devastation of our most valuable and vulnerable children.

Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, the Connecticut medical examiner in search of a cause, has turned to “genetic clues” to explain Adam Lanza’s motives. Individuals with an autism spectrum disorder are not known routinely to exhibit violent behavior, so he reasoned that other genetic markers may explain his psychopathic behavior. At this time, however, no such genetic clues exist that could be used to explain his actions.

Genetics and environment interactions that produce a disease like diabetes are extremely complex. The factors that lead to an individual’s behavior are even more complicated.

View the original article here: Genetics Will Not Explain Newtown

Personalized medicine’s perverse economics

Does personalized medicine cut the mustard when it comes to treating cancer? Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, believes that it does not. Using the mustard metaphor, he shows how personalized medicine undermines the pharmaceutical industry’s profits. If the one-size-fits-all approach to prescribing cancer drugs were abandoned, drug companies would be forced to change their business model, most notably by increasing prices radically – or stop producing the drugs altogether.
View the original article here: Personalized Medicine’s Perverse Economics 

Can homosexuality be explained by epigenetics?

So, last week featured a lot of news about a paper that came out in the Quarterly Review of Biology titled “Homsexuality as a Consequence of Epigenetically Canalized Sexual Development.” The authors were Bill Rice (UCSB), Urban Friberg (Uppsala U), and Sergey Gavrilets (U Tennessee). The paper got quite a bit of press. Unfortunately, most of that press was of pretty poor quality, badly misrepresenting the actual contents of the paper. (PDF available here.)

I’m going to walk through the paper’s argument, but if you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the tl;dr:

This paper presents a model. It is a theory paper. Any journalist who writes that the paper “shows” that homosexuality is caused by epigenetic inheritance from the opposite sex parent either 1) is invoking a very non-standard usage of the word “shows,” or 2) was too lazy to read the actual paper, and based their report on the press release put out by the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis.

View the original article here: Epigenetics and Homosexuality

Bats evolved to fix DNA from damage caused by flight

[N]ow, thanks to our ability to sequence genomes, some researchers have provided a new picture of how bats manage to adapt to such distinctive lifestyles. The DNA sequences suggest that all bats share some adaptations that help them cope with the metabolic demands of flight, while individual species have other adaptations that help them handle echolocation and hibernation.

High metabolic exertion [read: flight] tends to produce oxygen radicals, which damage cellular components, including DNA. So, the authors tested whether the genes that are involved in maintaining DNA integrity showed signs of having undergone evolutionary selection (we’ve explained how to do that test in the past). Many of the genes involved in repairing DNA damage did show signs of selection, as did genes that help stop cells from dividing if they’ve picked up too much damage. Both species have also lost a gene that helps cells trigger an inflammatory response when they sense DNA outside of the cell’s nucleus.

View the original article here: Bats evolved to fix DNA from damage caused by flight

Lessons from Prop 37 — the future of genetic engineering in agriculture

To me, the bread and butter of GM will be control of plant diseases. Control of plant diseases are not as ‘sexy’ as addressing drought, but the big success of agriculture is in reducing pest damage via various improved varieties, chemical pesticides, IPM, and agricultural practices. Biotechnology provides improved arsenal to understand what we are doing, and to find precisely find mechanisms to address pest or other problems with minimal side effects. The more we know about genomes, and the more experience we have with biotechnology, the more effective they are. As in electronics, the more we understand the inner workings of the atom, the better we are able to utilize for the betterment of humankind.

View the original article here: Lessons from Prop 37 and the future of genetic engineering in agriculture

Is Obama kowtowing to anti-biotech activists?

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It’s ridiculous that it’s taken this long for the regulatory process [of AquaBounty salmon] to reach the conclusion that the product is safe for consumers and the environment. Now we will get to see if the president will keep his promise that his adminisration will “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

View the original article here: Is Obama Kowtowing to Anti-Biotech Activists?

Food movement needs to follow the money, not waste time on labels

Over the past several years I have spent a great deal of time in high-security, limited-access genetic modification laboratories. While researching my latest book, I peered at glow-in-the-dark grapes (their seeds spiked with jellyfish genes), inspected attempts to create square tomatoes (a yet-to-be-decoded DNA sequence may dictate the shape of all fruit), and marveled at rice plants engineered to be immune to Asia’s deadliest rice blight. None of the GMO cornucopia I ogled is commercially available—yet. But even if these laboratory specimens never make it to the shelves, about 70 percent of processed foods in U.S. supermarkets already contain genetically modified ingredients.

Should you be concerned about the healthfulness of such foods? This question monopolized a good deal of the recent diatribes deployed in the lead-up to last month’s vote on California’s Proposition 37, which would have mandated labeling on GM foods.

But this is the wrong question.

View the original article here: Genetically Monetized Food

White House lifts political block on GE salmon

Salmon Fillets CREDIT AquaBounty

The Food and Drug Administration today released an electronic version of its Environmental Assessment for a genetically modified (GM) salmon developed by AquaBounty Technologies of Massachusetts—effectively giving its preliminary seal of approval on the first transgenic animal to be considered for federal approval.

According to sources within FDA, the EA had been approved by the all the relevant agencies on April 19, 2012, but had been blocked for release on orders from inside the executive branch—which has raised both legal and ethical issues of political interference with science and the independent work of federal agencies.

The decision by the White House to rescind its order to block the FDA from releasing the EA came Wednesday within hours after the publication of an investigative report by the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP) last Wednesday.

“There was no place for the White House to hide anymore,” said one FDA insider.

View the original article here: White House Reverses Itself, Lifts Political Block on FDA Approval of GM Salmon

Virus-based gene therapy holds promise for neurological disease

New research demonstrates the long term safety and benefit of a virus-based gene therapy that has been applied for the first time in a clinical setting. This novel therapy was used to treat young patients with Canavan disease, a devastating inherited neurological condition that typically takes a child’s life by age ten. Results of the study have just been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, in an article that describes this first clinical application of a viral-based gene therapy for a neurodegenerative/neurological disorder.

View the original article here: Novel virus-based gene therapy holds promise for Canavan disease 

Personalised medicine and the duty of disclosure

Over forty years ago Windeyer J aptly noted that law was “marching with medicine but in the rear and limping a little”. The statement remains relevant today, with medical science evolving at a pace that leaves the law looking relatively amoebic.

Despite the benefits of genomic testing, there are also disadvantages to having knowledge of genetic information when applying for risk-rated insurance products. Such products include certain life insurance products (eg trauma, disability, sickness and accident, and income protection insurances) and some general insurance products (eg travel, professional indemnity, non-compulsory first and third party property motor vehicle, and some kinds of sickness and accident insurance). At present, applicants for risk-rated insurance products, such as life and general insurance products, are subject to a duty of disclosure to inform insurers where they are aware of any factors which may be relevant to an insurer’s decision to underwrite a risk. A duty of utmost good faith also applies to parties entering into such insurance contracts. These duties encompass the duty of an insured to declare the results of any genetic or genomic testing (together genetic testing) where they are relevant to the risk being underwritten in an insurance contract.

View the original article here: Mind the double bind – personalised medicine and the duty of disclosure

Gene therapy extends lives of children with brain disease

Children born with a rare, genetic brain disorder that causes severe atrophy and often leads to death within three years, are still alive 7 to 10 years after being treated with an experimental gene therapy, a study showed.

The findings, published [Thursday] in the journal Science Translational Medicine, described the procedure of inserting a virus containing healthy genes into the children’s brains through holes drilled into their skulls. The 13 children, the youngest of whom was 3 months old and diagnosed with the disorder while in the womb, were treated at the Cell and Gene Therapy Center at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Stratford.

View the original article here: Gene Therapy Extends Lives of Children With Brain Disease

Connecticut has ‘no need’ for GMO food label

Providing consumers with the facts is a good idea. But the fight against genetically modified organisms is fueled more by fear and guesswork than by responsible evidence.

Activists and legislators recently rallied near the state Capitol for a bill requiring food made with GMOs to be so labeled. Last session, such a bill died before coming to a vote. The protesters say consumers deserve to know what they’re eating. They are suspicious of corporations such as DuPont, Monsanto, PepsiCo and Kraft that reap financial gains from “Frankenfood.”

Agricultural products have been “genetically modified,” in terms of selective breeding, since prehistoric times. But for the past 20 years, scientists have been able to mechanically transplant genes to achieve the results they want.

View the original article here: No Need For ‘Frankenfood’ Label

Breakthrough technique has potential to stop some genetic disorders from being inherited

Today, researchers at the New York Stem Cell Foundation and Columbia University Medical Center announced the success of a new technique to transfer the nucleus of one human egg cell into another.

This technique has the clinical potential to eliminate the inheritance of mutations in mitochondrial DNA that cause multiple diseases in the children of parents conceiving by in-vitro fertilization.

“Through this study, we have shown that it should be possible to prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial disorders,” said Dr. Dieter Egli, co-lead author of the study which appears today in Nature. (“Nuclear Genome Transfer in Human Oocytes Eliminates Mitochondrial DNA Variants”).

View the original article here: Nuclear Transfer Breakthrough Offers A Way To Prevent Mitochondrial Disorders

Appeals court rules transgneic beet challenge moot

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A federal appeals court has refused to revive a lawsuit filed by biotech critics that challenged USDA permits for growing transgenic sugar beets.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled the complaint by the Center for Food Safety and other groups was moot.

View the original article here: Appeals court rules biobeet challenge moot

Medical examiner wants to probe Sandy Hook shooter’s genetics

Connecticut’s chief medical examiner said he hopes Adam Lanza’s biology will help explain why the Sandy Hook shooter went on a deadly rampage.

The Hartford Courant reports that Dr. H. Wayne Carver has asked a geneticist at the University of Connecticut to join in his investigation of the killings.

“I’m exploring with the department of genetics what might be possible, if anything is possible,” Carver told the paper on Tuesday. “Is there any identifiable disease associated with this behavior?”

View the original article here: Adam Lanza Motive: Medical Examiner Wants To Probe Sandy Hook Shooter’s Genetics

Cotton genome offers clues for fiber improvement

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From the stockings decorating mantles to the new outfits in display windows calling to shoppers, cotton is woven into the fabric of the holiday season. For bioenergy researchers, however, fiber composition matters more than color and texture as each cotton strand is composed of more than two dozen coils of cellulose, a target biomass for next-generation biofuels.

In the Dec. 20, 2012 edition ofNature, an international consortium of researchers from 31 institutions including a team from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) present a high-quality draft assembly of the simplest cotton (Gossypium raimondii) genome. Additionally, the team compared the genome from this ancestral species indigenous to the Americas to several other sets of cotton data contributed by the U.S. Department  of Agriculture (USDA). The results have allowed the researchers to trace the evolution of cotton over millions of years from wild varieties to the domesticated species that are now associated with textile production.

View the original article here: Unraveling the Threads: Simplest Cotton Genome Offers Clues for Fiber Improvements

Indiana farmer challenges Monsanto before Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether a 75-year-old soybean farmer from Indiana is liable to Monsanto Co. in a patent infringement lawsuit that could have big implications for American farmers who purchase “Roundup Ready” seed that has been genetically modified and resistant to weed-killers. 

View the original article here: Indiana farmer, Monsanto go toe-to-toe in patent fight before Supreme Court

GMO apples inflame Washington label debate

The president of a Canadian company seeking government approval of a genetically modified apple plans to label it as such but opposes efforts to mandate labels.

Organizers of Washington Initiative 522 requiring labeling of any genetically modified food sold in the state say they probably have the 241,153 voter signatures needed by Jan. 4 to get the measure before the Legislature in 2013 and on next fall’s general election ballot if the Legislature takes no action.

Proponents question the safety of genetically modified food and maintain that their polls show most consumers want to know if food is genetically modified.

View the original article here: GMO apples inflame Washington label debate

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