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Genome map plots variations between humans
THE first published map of human genetic differences offers a major step towards truly personalized medicine, from predicting who will get which disease to finding ways of choosing the best drug for an individual, scientists said recently.
The map looks at more than 1.5 million tiny genetic differences among 71 people, said the team at Perlegen Sciences, Inc, a subsidiary of a California-based gene chip maker. This is enough to find some of the most common genetic variations involved in disease, said David Cox, Perlegen’s chief scientific officer.
“This project sets a new milestone in the search for genetic elements linked to complex genetic diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and multiple sclerosis,” he said.
The idea is not to find one or two “disease genes” but instead to look for patterns that can account for how a person may respond, for instance, to specific high blood pressure drugs, Cox and colleagues reported in the journal Science. “It’s kind of like being a matchmaker,” Cox added. Eventually, he hopes, individual doctors will be able to consult such a map to determine which drug to prescribe to a patient.
Advances in cloning
A cow has been cloned using a new technique, claimed some Australian scientists the other day.
“Brandy,” a Holstein-Fresian calf, was born in December after being “created” by researchers from Melbourne’s Monash Institute of Medical Research and the Genetics Australia Cooperative. Researcher Vanessa Hall said it was the first cow to be cloned using a technique known as serial nuclear transfer.
Under the procedure, the cells used to “create” the cow underwent two rounds of nuclear transfer in the cloning process, instead of the normal one, before they developed into an embryo ready for implantation into a surrogate cow.
“By repeating the nuclear transfer we hoped to improve the reprogramming of the fused donor cells and produce healthier embryos, which are more likely to proceed to live births,” Hall said.
Cloning technology has advanced significantly since Dolly the sheep was successfully cloned in 1997 and scientists have been able to clone many animals, including cows. But few implanted cloned embryos survive full-term pregnancies.
The oldest get even older
Two homo sapiens skulls, originally thought to be 130,000 year old when they were unearthed in 1967, have now been declared 195,000 years old, based on geological evidence.
“It pushes back the beginning of the anatomically modern humans,” said geologist Frank Brown, Dean of the University of Utah’s College of Mines and Earth Sciences and co-author of a new study into the skulls known as Omo I and Omo II.
The results of a study with New York’s Stony Brook University and the Australian National University were published in the science journal Nature. After looking at the volcanic ash where the skulls were found along the Omo river, the researchers not only dated the remains as the same age but pushed back the date of their existence, making them by far the oldest humans.
“On this basis we suggest that hominid fossils Omo I and Omo II are relatively securely dated to 195.5 (thousand) years old ... making Omo I and Omo II the oldest modern human fossils yet recovered,” the study concluded.
The new dating firmly underpins the “out of Africa” theory of the origin of modern humans. Brown said the redating was important culturally because it pushed back the known dawn of mankind, the record of which in most cases only starts 50,000 years ago.
“Which would mean 150,000 years of Homo sapiens without cultural stuff such as evidence of eating fish, of harpoons, anything to do with music, needles, even tools,” he said.
“This stuff all comes in very late except for stone knife blades, which appeared between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago, depending on whom you believe,” he added in a commentary.
Tsunami warning system
Japanese researchers are developing a faster, more precise tsunami-alert system that would directly monitor the earthquake-triggered waves as they speed towards shore, media reports said recently.
The Japanese warning system can issue an alert for a deadly tsunami within minutes of an undersea quake. But false alarms are common because the system’s warnings are estimates based on a quake’s magnitude and epicenter, not on actual wave measurements.
Researchers at Akita University in northern Japan and a state-funded Japanese institute want to remove the guesswork with a system that measures the rise and fall of the ocean’s surface with shortwave radar, the Nihon Keizai newspaper and other dailies said.
Shortwave radar has been used by military planes and ships for surveillance and by satellites for weather forecasting. Such radar devices cost about $476,200 each.
Tomoyuki Takahashi, an assistant professor at Akita University, and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology plan to test the system over the next two years, and hope Japan’s Meteorological Agency will adopt their system by 2007.
Mobile phone virus
The world’s first mobile phone virus has spread to the United States from its birthplace in the Philippines, a security research firm revealed the other day.
The virus, called “Cabir”, has spread slowly into 12 countries and marks the beginning of the mobile phone virus era, which could one day disrupt the lives of many of the world’s 1.5 billion mobile phone users.
The biggest impact of the relatively innocuous virus, found in about 15 variations so far, is draining mobile phone batteries, said Mikko Hypponen, director of the Finnish anti-virus research company, F-Secure. He said “Cabir” was found in a store in Santa Monica, California, when a passing techie spotted a telltale sign on the screen of a phone. — Sci-tech World Report
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