Nature Genetics iCOGS collection

This week Nature Genetics published a Focus issue on cancer risk, including findings from the COGS (Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study) consortium, published as 13 coordinated papers in this Nature Genetics iCOGS collection:

At Nature Genetics, we give voice to leading efforts to understand the genetic basis of disease.  Over the past six years, we have seen mass surveys of genetic variants across the human genome, called genome-wide association studies, yield key insights into hundreds of common diseases.

Today, we’re proud to see how COGS, extending this approach to oncology, has doubled the number of genetic regions implicated in breast, ovarian and prostate cancers.  As such, these 13 papers represent a milestone in our understanding of these common cancers, and exemplify what’s needed in such discovery efforts.

Some of the overall findings from the collection can be found in this blog post.

The Spoonful of Medicine blog have also been reporting on this news:

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In the largest cancer genotyping study to date, an international team of scientists spanning more than 160 research groups has identified 74 new genetic regions associated with breast, ovarian or prostate cancer—a near doubling of the number of susceptibility loci linked to these three hormone-related cancers.

“These findings are very significant and show the power of international collaborative research that provided additional knowledge regarding the common risk factors,” says Jan Korbel, a molecular biologist who studies prostate cancer at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, who was not part of the study.

You can follow the related online conversation using the #iCOGS and #NatGen hashtags.

The Heart of the Matter – Can Our Hearts Repair Themselves?

This week’s Soapbox Science guest post is by Joseph Jebelli, a Neuroscience PhD Candidate at University College London. He asks whether our hearts can repair themselves:

Recently however, a group at Harvard Medical School published a paper in the journal Nature giving strong evidence against this idea. They showed that, like the zebrafish, we too generate new heart cells from pre-existing ones, and that this phenomenon increases during a heart attack. This discovery is potentially a game changer for the field at large, for it suggests that our hearts possess zebrafish-like regenerative mechanisms – only on a much more diminished scale. Many researchers now believe that if we can figure out why this is, we may eventually be able to safely boost the regenerative capacity of our hearts for therapeutic gain. Strategies like this are motivating scientists everywhere, and for good reason – heart disease plagues developed nations and kills more people than any other disease. In the UK alone, it accounts for more than 179,000 deaths each year, costing an estimated £19 billion to the economy.

Continue to Joseph’s post to watch a campaign video by the British Heart Foundation.

Understanding adaptations may help in animal conservation

© BRAND X

Mohammed Yahia explains in the House of Wisdom blog, while falcons have evolved rapidly to become top predators, they are still vulnerable to rapid habitat loss, environmental changes, overexposure to pesticides and overharvesting for falconry:

A study published this week in Nature Genetics looks at the evolutionary history of two falcons: the peregrine falcon – who is the fastest predator in the world, clocked at speeds of 320 Km/h; and the saker, an endangered falcon that is popular in the Middle East and is the national emblem of the United Arab Emirates.

According to the researchers, the two falcons may have diverged 2.1 million years ago. They have rapidly evolved over the years, receiving their distinctive long, wide and curved beaks as well as superior sight to help then in hunting.

What does the future hold these birds of prey, find out in Mohammed’s post. 

James Cameron makes deep donation to oceanographers

Richard Monastersky reveals in the News Blog, after setting a record for the deepest single-person dive, filmmaker James Cameron has something else up his sleeve:

A visualization of the Mariana Trench with an exaggerated vertical scale.
NOAA

…filmmaker James Cameron stored his submersible in his garage and moved onto other projects — namely sequels to his hit 2009 movie Avatar. Now he’s pulling the craft, theDEEPSEA CHALLENGER (DSC), out of storage. On the anniversary of Cameron’s trip to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts announced that it is forming a partnership with Cameron and that he is donating his submersible and associated technology to the research centre.

The submersible, which reached a depth of 10,900 metres, is the only one capable of ferrying a human to the lower third of the ocean’s full range. The next deepest-diving submersible, China’s Jiaolong, just passed the 7,000-metre mark during dives last year.

Continue to the post to find out more.

Hopkins scientist to lead the NIH’s basic science branch

NIGMS’s new director Jon Lorsch
MIKE CIESIELSKI

This week, the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)—the $2.4 billion branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced that Jon Lorsch, a biophysical chemist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, would become the new director:

“They could not have done better at the NIH,” says Lorsch’s colleague Mario Amzel, director of the Biophysics and Physical Chemistry department at Hopkins. “He’s one of the best teachers at the medical school and has a strong interest in education, which seems to be one of the directions in which the NIH wants to go now.”

In 2011, for example, Lorsch proposed a new integrated model for graduate education in the life sciences that addressed a number of challenges, including the increased information burden and the need to train researchers who can work across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

More details can be found in the post.

Compute Life

SciLogs blogger, Graham Morehead is looking at life and evolution in his latest post:

Whatever the first self-replicating molecule was, whether it was RNA-like, or even a cooperation of more than one molecule … whether the membrane came first, or the stuff inside it … we evolution believers think that something came “first.”

Once that first self-replicating molecule existed, it was able to multiply. Evolution was off and running. The question is: How hard was it to generate the first such molecule?

I have heard apologeticists preach about how impossible it was for any such molecule to come about randomly. An analogy is often made to the unlikely event of finding a watch on the ground in the middle of the woods. Would you ever say, “Wow, look at what evolved out here!”? Never. The lack of a mechanism for self-replication makes this analogy inappropriate.

Join in the discussion by leaving your thought in the comment thread.