Jenni: “The worksheet itself was pretty simple, and after she finished it, Emma paused and said, ‘But, you know, I’m not really in your family. Or at least …’ and she trailed off. David filled in, ‘you’re not in our genetic family, but we’re your parents.’ Emma nodded.
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes...
A 10 year old girl learns that her parents are not her true genetic parents after all. A simple school work with pen and paper revealed that information.
Nutritional genomics is a science studying the relationship between human genome, nutrition and health. It can be divided into two disciplines:
* Nutrigenomics: studies the effect of nutrients on health through altering genome, proteome, metabolome and the resulting changes in physiology.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are post-transcriptional regulators that bind to complementary sequences in the three prime untranslated regions (3' UTRs) of target messenger RNA transcripts (mRNAs), usually resulting in gene silencing.[1][2] miRNAs are short ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules, on average only 22 nucleotides long.
Actress Glenn Close has had her genome mapped by Illumina, one of the companies that is leading the race in whole-genome sequencing. This is not just empty celebrity gossip. Close says that she decided to take the test, which costs $48,000, to “move science forward.” I have no idea whether she personally paid for the test or Ilumina covered the cost for obvious reasons.
No matter who has paid for her personal test she made a great PR effort for the whole-Genome sequencing.
Turkey's government is about to pass legislation that could cripple the country's biological research.
Nature 463, 1000 (25 February 2010) | doi:10.1038/4631000a; Published online 24 February 2010
An absurd law
When politicians respond to popular distrust of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), they sometimes fail to grasp how intricately molecular technologies infiltrate different areas of science. A case in point is now playing out in Turkey, where an attempt to regulate GMOs in agriculture has morphed into a draft law that could wipe out the country's biomedical research.
It took Christopher Columbus almost 5 weeks to reach the continent America. Today, you fly to New York in about 8 hours. The first commercial computer was about $1,550,000 and weighed somewhere around 13 tons.
How much did you spend for your cellphone, for your labtop ?
In 1918, only 1 in 13 US families owned a car. By 1929, 4 out of 5 families had one. In the same time period, the number of cars on the road increased from 8 million to 23 million.
"For someone who likes to imagine herself as tech savvy, it was a heady moment.
Genome Sequencing is a collaborative work. Not only bio-tech companies but also companies with IT structure are working towards the same goal. Whole genome sequencing under $1000. Even Amazon.com is on the track.
* Agilent Technologies Inc, a leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis, offers the SureSelect Target Enrichment System, which helps geneticists analyze larger numbers of samples.
* Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services offers data storage products through so-called cloud computing, in which data is stored remotely on servers in data centers.
Young scientists at a Chinese genomics institute are foregoing conventional postgraduate training for the chance to be part of major scientific initiatives. Is this the way of the future?
In 1980s, if you finish your work on the kinetics of a particular enzyme you used to earn your Ph.D.
During early 90s complete analysis of a gene and associated pathways with western and southern techniques was a complete Ph.D. topic.
DNA is the blue print of the genetic information. Imagine, your genes are special text recipes for proteins. The taste of a dish is based on content of a recipe. Experienced gourmets can even judge a dish based on the recipe alone. As an analogy, it can be determined whether a protein is cancerous or not just based on the genetic blue print information on your DNA alone. DNA based diagnostics is much more reliable than the protein based diagnostics.
