Posts Tagged ‘genetics’

Nabbing suspicious SNPs

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Scientists search the whole genome for clues to common diseases

By Regina Nuzzo

Science News
Vol.173 #19 / Feature

June 21st, 2008

Old-fashioned gene hunting wasn’t terribly efficient. Geneticists typically pursued one gene at a time, armed only with guesses—usually wrong—about which chunks of genetic code might be linked to human disease.

Nature 445, 881-885 (22 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature05616Geneticists managed to bag a few trophies anyway—genes for Huntington’s chorea and cystic fibrosis, for example—mostly in rare diseases caused by a problem in a single, high-powered gene. Unfortunately, most of the more common diseases, such as type II diabetes, are instead controlled by a whole crowd of gene variants, each playing a small and often subtle role in the path to disease.

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Do I smell sexy?

Monday, May 19th, 2008

For members who submit a saliva sample, dating website ScientificMatch.com plays matchmaker using DNA and smell.

THE MATING GAME

By Regina Nuzzo

Special to the Times

Los Angeles Times — Health Section

May 19, 2008

Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles TimesSwapping spit: The term takes on a more refined meaning at the new dating site ScientificMatch.com. A prerequisite for signing up — in addition to having a bit of cash to spare — involves swishing a cotton swab inside your cheek and mailing a juicy sample of skin cells and saliva.

What do you get in return for your DNA-laden drool? A chance at genetic and olfactory harmony. ScientificMatch.com — perhaps the first company to combine the commercial potential of genetic testing, dating and the Internet in one package — offers to find you a lover who smells good.

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Computing the ravages of time

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

Using Algorithms To Tackle Alzheimer’s Disease

by Regina Nuzzo, PhD
Biomedical Computation Review

Fall 2007
Feature Story

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In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tubingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing rapidly. Confused and helpless, she was growing inarticulate and fearful of her family, Alzheimer reported. Auguste died four years later.

During the autopsy Alzheimer found dramatic shrinkage in Auguste’s brain, with cells that were already dead and dying at the time of her death — plus two kinds of microscopic deposits that Alzheimer had never seen before. He summed it up in his presentation abstract: “All in all, we are faced obviously with a peculiar disease process.”

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