In Nature this week, a special Insight looks at cardiovascular disease. Several articles examine potential new therapies, including using stem cells for treating heart disease, identifying biomarkers, and early detection using new imaging techniques.
Cornell geneticists used sequencing data from more than 10,000 genes obtained from 20 Europeans and 15 African-Americans to find that Europeans carry proportionally more mutations that could reduce fitness. A news article looks at how, and if, these mutations are actually relevant to disease susceptibility while Daniel MacArthur at Genetic Future wonders what this knowledge might mean once we can readily sequence genomes.
At the University of Michigan, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues performed a sweeping analysis of genetic variation, including SNP and CNV coverage, in a worldwide sample of 29 populations. States Rosenberg in another article, "Now that we have the technology to look at thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of genetic markers, we can infer human population relationships and ancient migrations at a finer level of resolution than has previously been possible."
A team of UW Madison scientists have discovered an important protein in the oxidative stress pathway. Named Star-PAP, this protein, they found, adds a tail onto mRNAs that serves to turn them on and off; it also makes up part of a pathway that contains a genetic "on-off" switch for a key protein known as heme oxygenase-1, a molecule that protects cells from oxidative stress.
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