NIMH Looks to Fund Projects Investigating The Role of miRNAs in Mental Disorders

June 14, 2007

By Doug Macron

The funding opportunities are expected to generate data that will contribute to the disaggregation of the molecular machinery underlying mental disorders by integrating sequence-specific modulators of post-transcriptional gene expression into a theoretical framework of disease pathophysiology, according to the NIMH.

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Young Investigator Profile

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Assistant Professor
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Papers of Note

Connection Between Epigenome, Selective Mutability, Evolution, and Human Disease
Li, Harris et al., PLoS Genetics
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Genetic Data for Modern Genetic Breeds 'Have Yet to Shed Light on Dog Origins'
Larson, Karlsson et al., PNAS
A team led by researchers at the University of Durham investigate the value of modern genetic data to elucidate the origins of dog domestication by analyzing 49,024 autosomal SNPs in 19 wolves and 1,375 dogs, representing 35 breeds. The team reports having uncovered conflicting evidence when correlating the earliest archeological dogs with the geographic locations of 14 breeds thought to be ancient. "These genetically distinct ancient breeds only appear so because of their relative isolation, suggesting that studies of modern breeds have yet to shed light on dog origins," the authors write.
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A pair of studies, one published in Nature and one published in Nature Genetics, detail the efforts of researchers who used exome sequencing to look into the mutational profiles and pathways that can contribute to prostate cancer. The first group found nine genes with recurrent somatic mutations, six of which had previously been implicated in the disease. The second group demonstrated that recurrent mutations in the ubiquitin ligase-coding gene called SPOP define a non-ETS gene fusion containing prostate cancer subtype.
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Genome Technology Magazine
More than a decade ago, fluorescent reporter studies highlighted the stochastic nature of gene expression, and biologists then began to examine the phenotypic heterogeneity they saw in clonal cell populations, through they chalked up what they saw to noisiness in gene expression. Still, researchers wondered about the cause of the randomness they had observed. Now, biophysicists and systems biologists are looking into that question and aim to figure out how and why single cells and molecules behave the way they do, and the consequences of that behavior.

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NIMH Looks to Fund Projects Investigating The Role of miRNAs in Mental Disorders

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