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Using supercomputers to compare portions of the human genome with those of other mammals, researchers at Cornell have discovered some 300 previously unidentified human genes, and found extensions of several hundred genes already known.
The discovery is based on the idea that as organisms evolve, sections of genetic code that do something useful for the organism change in different ways.
The research is reported by Adam Siepel, Cornell assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology, Cornell postdoctoral researcher Brona Brejova and colleagues at several other institutions in the journal Genome Research.

Acclaimed stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, has reported that he and his Kyoto University colleagues have successfully reprogrammed human adult cells to function like pluripotent embryonic stem (ES) cells. Because it circumvents much of the controversy and restrictions regarding generation of ES cells from human embryos, this breakthrough, reported in the journal Cell, should accelerate the pace of stem cell research.
Last year, Yamanaka, who is also a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD), reported that he and his Kyoto colleagues had reprogrammed mouse skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, laying the foundation to apply this methodology in human cells.

There's always been speculation that human embryonic stem cell research was not worth the controversy due to uncertainty about their value in research and objections from womens' rights groups on one side and right-to-life groups on the other.
Pluripotent cell lines from a non-embryonic source would seem to satisfy everyone
By introducing four genes into human fibroblasts,researchers can transform adult human skin cells into cells that resemble embryonic stem cells, researchers report in Cell. The converted cells have many of the physical, growth and genetic features typically found in embryonic stem cells and can differentiate to produce other tissue types, including neurons and heart tissue, according to the researchers.

To derive embryonic stem cells, it is necessary to remove critical cells from an embryo, resulting in its destruction. That triggers opposition from right-to-life critics of the research, who cite moral and ethical concerns.
The research has also generated opposition from some members of the women's movement who object the use of stimulating drugs in women who agree to donate eggs for cloning research aimed at creating specialized embryonic stem cell lines.
Recent research has the potential to render both of those objections moot, since it showed that introducing four genes into cells derived from skin cells, called human fibroblasts, resulted in cells that essentially share all the features of embryonic stem cells - but without using or destroying embryos.

With predictions that more than 3 billion people will live in areas facing severe water shortages by the year 2025, the challenge is to find an environmentally benign way to remove salt from seawater. Global climate change, desertification, and over-population are already taking their toll on fresh water supplies. In coming years, fresh water could become a rare and expensive commodity.

MIT researchers have identified a family of proteins key to the formation of the communication networks critical for normal brain function. Their research could lead to new treatments for brain injury and disease.
The team, led by MIT biology professor Frank Gertler, found that a certain family of proteins is necessary to direct the formation of axons and dendrites, the cellular extensions that facilitate communication between neurons.
The work focuses on cellular outgrowths called neurites, which are the precursors to axons and dendrites. Understanding how neurites form could eventually lead to therapies involving stimulation of neurite growth, said Gertler.

Doctored photos of past public events can influence what people think they remember of the incident, as well as altering their attitudes and any subsequent responses, according to research published today in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Three researchers, UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and University of Padua researchers Franca Agnoli and Dario Sacchi, came to this conclusion after showing either original or digitally doctored images to 299 people aged 19-84. The images were of two different protests, one in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, the other 2003 in Rome.

Sexy dads produce sexy sons, in the insect world at least. While scientists already knew that specific attractive traits, from cricket choruses to peacocks’ tails, are passed on to their offspring, the heritability of attractiveness as a whole is more contentious. New research by the University of Exeter, published in Current Biology, shows that attractiveness is hereditary.
The research team, based on the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, focused on the fruitfly Drosophila simulans. They paired up males and females at random and found the length of time it took for them to mate ranged from just two minutes to two hours. Female fruitflies need to make themselves accessible to males for mating to take place, so males cannot force copulation.

At MIT economist says U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could grow more quickly in the next 50 years than in the previous half-century and technological advances could hurt rather than help.
The paper by Professor Emeritus Richard Eckaus of the MIT Department of Economics and his co-author, Ian Sue Wing, of Boston University, "The Implications of the Historical Decline in U.S. Energy Intensity for Long-Run CO2 Emission Projections," was published in the November issue of Energy Policy. In it, the pair portray the changing interplay among technology, energy use and CO2 emissions based on a simulation of the U.S.

Three decades have passed since gene therapy pioneer William W. Hauswirth, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the University of Florida began work on a virus that could safely deliver corrective genes into living animals.
It’s been six years since a multi-university team used gene therapy to give sight to puppies born with a defect that causes blindness.
Now the gene-transfer technique is being tested for safety in people in a phase 1 clinical research study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Florida with support from the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

Before you plop in front of the television for a day of football, pizza and beer, you might consider this: new research shows that in young adults, decades of hard-won progress in reducing the risk of heart disease appears to be stalling, as recent death rates from coronary disease remain almost unchanged in young men and may even be increasing in women.
The research, conducted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, appears in the November 27, 2007, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC).
The worrisome plateau in death rates comes at a time when young Americans are increasingly likely to be obese and suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure and other cardiovascular risk factors.

Brain scans used to track changes in a dozen patients who received an experimental gene therapy show that the treatment normalizes brain function - and the effects are still present a year later.
Andrew Feigin, MD, and David Eidelberg, MD, of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research collaborated with Michael Kaplitt, MD, of Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan and others to deliver genes for glutamic acid decarboxylase (or GAD) into the subthalamic nucleus of the brain in Parkinson’s patients. The study was designed as a phase I safety study, and the genes were delivered to only one side of the brain to reduce risk and to better assess the treatment.