High Level of Fried Food Toxins Found in Infants
Advanced Glycation End products (AGEs) are found in most heated foods and in commercial infant formulas. Also found, reducing AGEs improves adult diabetes.

‘Genetic Biopsy’ Could Help Pick Best Eggs for IVF
Analyzing genetic material in polar bodies, shed at fertilization, can yield information about gene expression in the egg without disturbing the egg itself.

Sox2 Marks Pluripotency in Most Adult Stem Cells
Sox2 appears to be the only transcription factor appearing in all stem cell stages – embryonic, fetal and adult. It may also indicate pluripotent adult stem cells.

Stem Cell Reprogramming Safer than Thought
Selecting better donor cells and using more sensitive genome-survey techniques allows identifying and reprogramming methods safer than in current use.

October 6, 2011--------News Archive

Invasive Melanoma Higher in Children Than Adults
A study of young people with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer, has found that some children have a higher risk of invasive disease than adults.

All Human Egg Donors Should Be Compensated
When you donate your eggs to fertility clinics for infertile parents, you are compensated. But if you donate your eggs for stem research, you are not.

Chronic Stress Short-circuits Some Parents
Moms with higher depressive responses exhibit symptoms of extreme stress with distinct types of problem parenting, from neglect and hostility to insensitivity.

October 5, 2011--------News Archive

Intensive Exposure Best for Reading Difficulties
Intensive daily training for a limited period is better for children with reading and writing difficulties than the traditional remedial tuition offered by schools.

A Shot of Cortisone Will Stop Traumatic Stress!
A single injection of cortisone can prevent PTSD in 60% who experience trauma.

Asthma Guidelines Do Not Reduce Readmissions
Hospital compliance with The Children's Asthma Care (CAC) guidelines makes little difference in a patient's return for another asthma attack.

October 4, 2011--------News Archive

How the Brain Makes Memories: Rhythmically!
The brain learns through changes in the strength of its synapses in response to stimuli. However, the stimulus must be rhythmic - timed at exact intervals.

Anesthesia Exposure Linked to Learning Disability
Research has found a link among children undergoing multiple surgeries requiring general anesthesia before age 2 and learning disabilities later in childhood.

How Vertebrates Establish Left–Right Asymmetry
Although we appear bilaterally symmetrical on the outside, our internal organs are asymmetrically positioned along a left–right axis.

October 3, 2011--------News Archive

Glucosamine-like Supplement Suppresses MS Attacks
UCI study shows promise of metabolic therapy for autoimmune diseases.

Early to Bed and Barly to Rise - Keeps Kids Lean
Bedtime found to be as important for preteens and teens as getting enough sleep.

Discovered: "Flexible" Brain DNA Changes to Suit
Finding has implications for treatment of wide range of diseases.

Mother's Love Unravels Gene Sequencing Mystery
A mother's determination solves the strange symptoms in her twins. Personalized medicine through genome sequencing is working for this family.

Genome Architecture Foretells Genome Instability
In normal cell division, DNA gets copied perfectly and distributed between daughter cells evenly. But occasional breaks during division rearrange the results.

MITOSIS: the process of evenly copying and distributing DNA into TWO cells.

When cells divide normally, DNA gets copied perfectly and distributed equally between the 2 daughter cells of each division.

Occasionally though, DNA breaks during division and gets rearranged into duplications or with deletions to important parts of the DNA blueprint.

Now researchers at Baylor College of Medicine who study families with such genomic disorders have found a shared, yet unusual, architecture resulting from this jumble that is associated with very severe forms of disease.

They also identified the genomic elements that produce such architecture, a finding that will help predict other unstable regions in the human genome.

Unusual architecture leaves a footprint, and a search for similar footprints in other regions of the genome may identify regions that underwent the same alteration during the evolutionary past. These types of events might occur more often than previously expected. A report on their work appears online in the current issue of Nature Genetics.

The rearranged structure – triplicated gene material inverted and embedded within duplications of other genetic material – appeared in 20 percent of patients who had been diagnosed with MECP2 duplication syndrome, said first author Dr. Claudia Carvalho, a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Dr. James Lupski, vice chair of the department of molecular and human genetics at BCM and corresponding author of the report.

MECP2 mutation was first identified in Rett syndrome by the laboratory of Dr. Huda Zoghbi at BCM. In Rett syndrome, the protein associated with the gene has minimal or no activity and mainly affects girls. However, later studies showed that an increase in MeCP2 protein caused by increased MECP2 genes could cause another serious disorder in boys called MECP2 duplication syndrome.

In MECP2 duplication syndrome, patients with the unusual complex triplication – called in shorthand, DUP (duplication)-TRP (triplication)/INV (inverted)-DUP – have a more severe constellation of symptoms associated with the disorder. Patients require oxygen or a ventilator and have hearing loss, heart defects and difficulty swallowing that required a feeding tube. In most patients with the syndrome, developmental delays in motor skills, limited or absent speech, autistic behavior, intellectual disability and recurrent infections are also typical.

"Dr. Melissa Ramocki (another of the paper's first authors and an assistant professor of pediatrics – neurology at BCM) started to be able to predict which patients would have the DUP-TRP/INV-DUP," said Lupski. This means that the increased amount of genetic material increased the dosage of MeCP2 protein and made the disorder worse.

Carvalho believes that the rearrangement may have occurred during the sperm cell generation. During meiosis (sexual cell division), a cell divides and produces four haploid cells containing one copy of each chromosome. The resulting chromosome set in each gamete (sperm or egg) cell is a unique mixture of paternal and maternal DNA, ensuring that offspring are genetically distinct from either parent. The process involves copying DNA and producing new strands for which special cellular machinery exists.

Sometimes, this process goes wrong.

At one point, a piece of DNA replication machinery called the replication fork can collapse, forcing the cell to trigger its repair process. When the cell tries to make a new fork, the DNA can line up improperly and pair with a piece of seemingly compatible DNA oriented in the opposite direction. These elements are called "inverted repeats" and are ubiquitous in the human genome.

This first event causes replication of the DNA in the wrong direction – opposite to the way that it was going when the fork collapsed, which will lead to a segmental inverted duplication - a duplicated and inverted segment.

A second event, believed to be essential to the viability of the cell, will bring the replication fork back into the correct direction and resume the replication process. This second event may now triple the new replication fork which is re-established within the region that was just copied twice.

This jumble of machinery, mismatched DNA ends and aberrant reproduction of the gene material can cause the strange complex triplicate rearrangements that result in disease, and it appears to occur in more than just MECP2 duplication syndrome.

Studying patients with another genomic disorder associated with the PLP1 gene, researchers found the same unusual genomic architecture (The PLP1 gene is associated with Pelizaeus-Merzbacher Disease, Spastic Paraplegia 2). In each case, inverted repeats of genomic DNA sequence appear to help mediate the complex inverted triplication.

"These inversions are important," said Carvalho. "There is no easy way to assay them, and we don't know how common they are in the genome."

"It may be possible that there are a lot of disease genes there and we don't see them," said Lupski. "The same mechanism that causes disease might also be involved in evolutionary change. In fact, this mechanism may have created new genes that might have made us more fit for our environment."

Dr. Philip J. Hastings, professor of molecular and human genetics at BCM who has studied mutational events resulting in rearrangements of different genomes for many decades, helped work out how the rearrangements might happen and is an author on the report as well.

Other authors include: Davut Pehlivan, Luis Franco, Claudia Gonzaga-Jauregui, Ping Fang, Alanna McCall, Daniela del Gaudio, Marjorie Withers, Pengfei Liu, Sau Wai Cheung, John Belmont and Huda Zoghbi, all of BCM; Eniko Karman Pivnick of the University of Tennessee; Stacy Hines-Dowell of LeBonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee; Laurie Seaver and Sansan Lee of Kapiolani Medical Specialists in Honolulu, Hawaii; Linda Friehling of Children's Medical Associates in Alexandria, Virginia; and Rosemarie Smith of Maine Medical Center in Portland.

Funding for this work came from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Baylor College of Medicine Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

For more information on basic science research at Baylor College of Medicine, please go to From the Lab at Baylor College of Medicine.

Original article: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/bcom-gap092911.php