“Polygenic Adaptation”
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued a notice this week acknowledging the confusion over its coverage policy for germline next-generation sequencing for cancer patients.
A couple billion years ago, four molecules danced into the elegant double-helix structure of DNA, which provides the codes for life on our planet. But were these four players really fundamental to the appearance of life — or could others have also given rise to our genetic code?
A new study, published today (Feb. 20) in the journal Science, supports the latter proposition: Scientists have recently molded a new kind of DNA into its elegant double-helix structure and found it had properties that could support life.
But if natural DNA is a short story, this synthetic DNA is a Tolstoy novel.
The researchers crafted the synthetic DNA using four additional molecules, so that the resulting product had a code made up from eight letters rather than four.
Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists have figured out a better way to deliver a DNA editing tool to shorten the presence of the editor proteins in the cells in what they describe as a "hit and run" approach.
CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology is used to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR/Cas9 is an enzyme that is used like a pair of scissors to cut two strands of DNA at a specific location to add, remove or repair bits of DNA. But CRISPR/Cas9 is not 100 percent accurate and could potentially cut unexpected locations, causing unwanted results.
Loss of DNA repair mechanisms can leave specific mutation signatures in the genomes of cancer cells. To identify cancers with broken DNA-repair processes, accurate methods are needed for detecting mutation signatures and, in particular, their activities or probabilities within individual cancers. In this paper, we introduce a class of statistical modeling methods used for natural language processing, known as “topic models”, that outperform standard methods for signature analysis. We show that topic models that incorporate signature probability correlations across cancers perform best, while jointly analyzing multiple mutation types improves robustness to low mutation counts.
We analysed a large health insurance dataset to assess the genetic and environmental contributions of 560 disease-related phenotypes in 56,396 twin pairs and 724,513 sibling pairs out of 44,859,462 individuals that live in the United States. We estimated the contribution of environmental risk factors (socioeconomic status (SES), air pollution and climate) in each phenotype. Mean heritability (h2 = 0.311) and shared environmental variance (c2 = 0.088) were higher than variance attributed to specific environmental factors such as zip-code-level SES (varSES = 0.002), daily air quality (varAQI = 0.0004), and average temperature (vartemp = 0.001) overall, as well as for individual phenotypes. We found significant heritability and shared environment for a number of comorbidities (h2 = 0.433, c2 = 0.241) and average monthly cost (h2 = 0.290, c2 = 0.302). All results are available using our Claims Analysis of Twin Correlation and Heritability (CaTCH) web application.
DNA is spelled out with four letters, or bases. Researchers have now built a system with eight. It may hold clues to the potential for life elsewhere in the universe and could also expand our capacity to store digital data on Earth.
In 1985, the chemist Steven A. Benner sat down with some colleagues and a notebook and sketched out a way to expand the alphabet of DNA. He has been trying to make those sketches real ever since.
On Thursday, Dr. Benner and a team of scientists reported success: in a paper, published in Science, they said they have in effect doubled the genetic alphabet.
Natural DNA is spelled out with four different letters known as bases — A, C, G and T. Dr. Benner and his colleagues have built DNA with eight bases — four natural, and four unnatural. They named their new system Hachimoji DNA (hachi is Japanese for eight, moji for letter).
Crafting the four new bases that don't exist in nature was a chemical tour-de-force. They fit neatly into DNA’s double helix, and enzymes can read them as easily as natural bases, in order to make molecules.
Crispr Therapeutics AG shares surged after the company said it has treated the first human with the same genetic technology that shares its name in an early-stage study.
Crispr Therapeutics and partner Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. said on Monday morning that the first patient in a trial using CTX001, a therapy created using Crispr technology, as a treatment for the rare blood disease, beta thalassemia, received the one-time medicine. The pair also announced the enrollment of the first patient has started in a parallel study for the medicine in sickle-cell disease with the first dosing on track for mid-year.
Scientists have developed a single-step gene editing process that can increase corn yields.
The new technique uses pollen to transfer the components of CRISPR-Cas9 into another plant allowing them to produce gene edited corn, a process previously hindered by the thick cell walls of many plants, such as corn and wheat. Results of the first set of experiments were published on 4 March in Nature Biotechnology.
Whether a CRISPR-based editing tool makes the grade or needs remedial work isn’t clear until it is subjected to testing, thorough and systematic testing. Consequently, scientists based at South Korea’s Institute for Basic Science (IBS) are administering the CRISPR equivalent of standardized tests. Rather than present CRISPR tools with a #2 pencil and a fill-in-the-oval sheet, the scientists provide different guide RNAs. Then the scientists use genome sequencing to check for errors such as off-target effects.
Even the best editor sometimes introduces typos. That’s true whether the editor is human or a version of the much-heralded gene-editing tool CRISPR.
One type of CRISPR gene editor that changes individual DNA bases, rather than cutting DNA, introduces more unwanted mutations than expected in mouse embryos and rice plants, researchers report. Those mistakes occurred in places where the tool wasn’t supposed to make changes. Another tested base editor, however, didn’t make the undesirable edits. The results were described in two studies published online February 28 in Science.
Scientists have used pollen carrying CRISPR/Cas9 to genetically edit hard-to-edit crops like corn, opening the door to new ways to boost important crop yields.
China’s health ministry has issued draft regulations that will restrict the use of gene editing in humans, just three months after Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced that twin girls had been born with edited genomes. The proposal includes severe penalties for those who break the rules. If approved, scientists say the policy could have gains and drawbacks for research.
Lupus can be a stubborn disease to treat. Although many struck by the autoimmune condition live relatively normal lives, some suffer from kidney failure, blood clots, and other complications that can be deadly. Now, scientists have found that a novel treatment that wipes out the immune system’s B cells cures mice of the condition. Though the work is preliminary, it has excited researchers because it uses a therapy already approved for people with blood cancer.
The strategy is known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T therapy.
Shares of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (NYSE:TMO) recorded -1.92% loss during trading session on March 5th, 2019. The script traded as low as $253.405 and last traded at $254.46. 3.76 million shares changed exchanged hands during trading, a drop of -105.57% from the 30-day average session volume of 1.83M shares. The firm had previously closed at $259.45. The company has $402.00M outstanding shares, a price-to-earnings ratio of 35.14, price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 4.20and a beta of 1.14. The company has a RSI of 60.52, ATR of 4.29 and a volatility of 2.31% this week. TMO has a 52 week low price of $199.85 and a 52 week high price of $266.18.
The lab is no wildlife park for RNA, but life sciences researchers can capture and display low-abundance, unstable, and otherwise vulnerable species
RNA analysis would do well to follow the example set by naturalists, scientists who patiently add new species to their catalogs while remembering that any catalog, however comprehensive, is of limited interest. What really matters, in botany or zoology or, more pertinently, RNA biology, is learning how species impact each other and fulfill their environmental roles.
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells are about as cutting-edge as cancer care gets today. Having demonstrated the ability to eradicate tumor cells in up to 90% of patients with certain blood cancers, these engineered immune cells became the first class of gene therapy to win FDA approval in 2017—with Novartis’ Kymriah getting the nod in August, followed by Kite Therapeutics’ Yescarta in October.3 But Alexander Marson, MD, PhD, knows these sophisticated cells are capable of so much more.
Marson, an immunologist at the University of California at San Francisco, is exploring this potential by using the CRISPR-Cas9 system to introduce precisely targeted genome modifications. The idea is that by adding or deleting specific genomic sequences, one can make these cells more lethal for tumors but also safer for the patient. Marson’s team recently developed a platform called SLICE4—single-guide RNA (sgRNA) lentiviral infection with Cas9 protein electroporation—to perform diverse CRISPR modifications in many cells in parallel, in hopes of rapidly identifying changes that measurably improve CAR T-cell performance. “We’re pretty good at manufacturing the ‘hardware’ of gene edited cells, and we’re continuing to improve that,” says Marson. “The really interesting thing will be what genetic ‘software’ we can put into them.”
Xconomy Boston — Beam Therapeutics made a splash last year when it launched with $87 million to develop medicines that use a more precise form of CRISPR editing. Beam’s promise of CRISPR-based therapeutics that swap out specific bases or “letters” in the genome—something the current generation of CRISPR-based drugs can’t do—has been so enticing to investors that they have put in $135 million in a Series B investment less than a year after the first funding round.
Cancer Genetics, Inc. (NasdaqCM:CGIX) has seen year over year cash flow change of -1.00000. This is calculated as the one year percentage growth of the firm’s cash flow from operations from their publicly filed statement of cash flows. Cash reserves are an important element for an investor to consider when analyzing a stock. A continued reduction in cash flow could spell trouble for a firm while on the other hand solid continued cash flow growth should translate into stock growth.
Since American Renal Associates Holdings Inc. (NYSE:ARA) and Cancer Genetics Inc. (NASDAQ:CGIX) are part of the Medical Laboratories & Research industry, they are influenced by contrast. The influences particularly affect the institutional ownership, earnings and valuation, profitability, risk, dividends, analyst recommendations of both companies.
Cancer Genetics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CGIX) stock enjoyed an overall uptrend of 11.94% from the beginning of 2019. The closing share price quoted for March 05, 2019 was $0.27. The 1.08% rally might have been tempting for an investor to buy at this point.
