Like other tests that delve into medical history, personal genome scans like those from 23andMe can reveal unexpected news. Slate tells the story of "Jackie" and her brother "Alex." (Slate changed their names.) Jackie, who works in a biomedical research lab, decided to get the 23andMe scan to learn about her disease risk, but she also found out that Alex, who also was tested, was her half-brother, and the man she thought was her father was not.

Previously, doctors could determine such instances of nonpaternity — the exact rate of which is unknown, but Slate says is thought to be about 2 percent or 3 percent for overall population — through blood type testing.

Such information can now, though, be gained through not only blood typing or more focused, specific paternity tests, but through other not-so-specific tests that people might be pursuing for other reasons.

23andMe, Slate notes, has two layers of consent to go through before it will show familial relationships. "This quirky system shows the difficulties that arise in managing genomic data," Slate adds. "It used to be that people chose to learn about themselves or not, and doctors helped determine which bits of information were appropriate for each of us to know. Now we're heading for a place where secrets flow more freely, where wise consumers must play defense with the facts."

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the advocacy group that has been working hard to press the US Congress to maintain funding at the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, has issued a new fact-sheet to highlight its case that federally funded support biomedical research is necessary.

Improved health, new technology innovations and industries, and a stronger economy are among the benefits that spring from federally funded science, and in particular from the kinds of basic research that the private sector depends on but is unlikely to conduct on its own, FASEB says.

Because of the uncertain and risky nature of basic research, FASEB says, and because the time-frame for basic science projects can, in some cases, be measured in decades, the private sector is far less likely to take the risk of long-term science efforts like the Human Genome Project.

NIH and NSF also are the foundations of US science culture, FASEB argues. They support the training of new generations of researchers, fund the awards that graduate students and postdocs use to start their careers, and enable investigators to pursue high-risk, high-reward projects.

Science is moving faster than ever, but support for that research "is under greater threat than it has ever been" because of the sequester, said Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, on Hardball with Chris Matthews last week. In the segment below, Collins also noted that the US spends about $200 billion to care for people with dementia, but only $500 million on dementia research — and that is now being cut 5 percent by the sequester.

However, Collins said his greatest worry is how such spending cuts will affect young scientists. "They are looking at this landscape in the United States and going, 'Well, maybe there's not a career here for me,'" he said. Those researchers, he said, may find another career or move to another country with better research support.

HT: DrugMonkey

Three researchers at New York University School of Medicine have been charged with taking bribes in exchange for sharing private details about their work with a Chinese medical imaging company and research institute supported by the Chinese government, the New York Times reports.

The Times writes that after the US National Institutes of Health awarded a grant to Yudong Zhu, an associate professor of radiology at the school, to support his MRI technology research, Zhu recruited Xing Yang and Ye Li as research engineers. However, they also received tuition, rent, and other financial support from an executive at a Chinese imaging company who is also associated with the government-supported institute there, the Times notes.

Zhu has also been charged with falsifying records.

It's "a case of inviting and paying for foxes in the henhouse," the federal prosecutor says.

The Associated Press adds that an internal review at NYU uncovered the issue, and that Li told NYU administrators that he received thousands of dollars from the Chinese institute for work on an MRI project. According to prosecutors, Zhu also admitted receiving about $500,000, the Times says.

Zhu and Yang have been released on bond, while Li is thought to have left the country, the Times reports.

The increasingly competitive funding atmosphere "breeds unethical behavior," writes James Hicks, a physiologist at the University of California, Irvine, in an opinion piece at The Scientist.

Hicks charts funding success rates at the US National Institutes of Health versus the number of retracted papers and says that "we have reached such a threshold: when only around 20 percent of grants are funded, the numbers of retractions skyrockets."

At his blog, Drug Monkey says the chart appears "truthy." However, "[n]obody knows if increased retraction rates over time are being observed because fraud is up or because detection is up," he says, adding that "since NIH grant success rates have likewise been plummeting as a function of Fiscal Year, the relationship is confounded."

Richard Van Noorden ‏at Spare Thoughts offers a different chart that examines NIH success rate versus retracted papers, but that divvies the data up by total retracted publications, retracted publication from the US, and retracted publication supported by NIH or the Public Health Service.

"You will see that there is little correlation between NIH success rates and retracted US publications or retracted papers with PHS support/NIH extramural support," Van Noorden writes, though he notes that there is a correlation between success rate and total retracted publications.

"[W]e probably won't find out until, say, 2015, whether squeezed NIH success rates in 2011 and 2012 led to a higher number of retracted NIH-funded or US (or even world) papers," he adds. "So maybe we'll find out that it did. I'm not holding my breath."

A California team has garnered evidence implicating the research organism Xenopus laevis (the South African clawed frog) in the presence of the frog fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatis in California. As they reported in PLOS One, investigators surveyed more than 200 archived frog samples by real-time PCR, including 178 samples collected in Africa between 1871 and 2000 and almost two dozen more collected in California between 2001 and 2010. The group found DNA from the Bd fungus in eight samples overall, with the earliest appearing in a 1934 sample from Kenya. Three of 23 California samples also carried the fungus. "If wild Xenopus appeared in California decades ago, during the 1970s … then by strong inference and supported by the findings reported here," they write, "introduction of Bd into this geographical area could have occurred in part via Bd infected Xenopus laevis."

Mycoplasma pneumoniae may turn up in the upper respiratory tracts children who aren't suffering from respiratory tract infections, according to a study in PLOS Medicine. Researchers from Erasmus MC and elsewhere used real-time PCR to test upper respiratory tract samples from 321 children with infections and 405 children without. Some 21 percent of asymptomatic children tested positive for M. pneumoniae DNA, compared to around 16 percent of those with documented infections, suggesting that the presence of M. pneumoniae alone may not necessarily herald infection. In follow-up experiments involving 202 more children, around 56 percent carried DNA from other bacterial or viral pathogens, too, both in the respiratory tract infection and asymptomatic groups.

The University of Würzburg's Cynthia Sharma and colleagues undertook a transcriptomics-based analysis of the gastroenteritis-causing bacterial species Campylobacter jejuni — work they describe in PLOS Genetics. The team used its so-called differential RNA sequencing strategy to sequence and compare the transcriptomes of four C. jejuni isolates (three from humans and one from a chicken), applying a new method to automatically annotate transcription start sites in each. "Overall," they write, "our study provides new insights into strain-specific transcriptome organization and [small RNAs], and reveals genes that could modulate phenotypic variation among strains despite high conservation at the DNA level."