News by Subject Biology

After more than five years and 672 patient samples, an OHSU research team has published the largest cancer dataset of its kind for a form of leukemia. The study, 'Functional Genomic Landscape of Acute Myeloid Leukemia,' published today in Nature.

Virtual reality could be a useful tool to encourage empathy, helpful behavior, and positive attitudes towards marginalized groups, according to a study published Oct. 17, 2018, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Fernanda Herrera from Stanford University, USA, and colleagues.

A new study comparing DNA and RNA data from Nigerian breast cancer patients to patients in a United States database found that aggressive molecular features were far more prevalent in tumors from women of African ancestry than women of European ancestry. Those differences could explain disparities in breast cancer mortality for black women across the African Diaspora and hasten a shift to precisely targeted therapies.

New findings presented today by CytoReason reveals possible new cellular players in the tumor microenvironment that could impact the treatment process for the most in-need patients -- those who have already failed to respond to ipilimumab (anti-CTLA4) immunotherapy. Once validated, the findings could point the way to improved strategies for the staging and ordering of key immunotherapies in refractory melanoma.

References form the basis of our comprehension of the world: they enable us to measure the height of our children or the efficiency of a drug. But when such yardsticks are faulty, doubts are cast on all the measurements that derive from them.

Reported Oct. 8, 2018, in Nature Microbiology, a team led by researchers at the US Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, has developed a pipeline to generate genomes from single cells of uncultivated fungi. The approach was tested on several uncultivated fungal species representing early diverging fungi, the earliest evolutionary branches in the fungal genealogy that provide a repertoire of important and valuable gene products.

Non-invasive prenatal testing potentially provides a wealth of genetic information, but the quality of the DNA sequencing is poor -- only about 10 percent coverage per genome. Nevertheless, scientists led by Rasmus Nielsen at UC Berkeley now show that with enough genomes -- in this case, 141,431 -- it is possible to find genetic variants linked with human traits, including birth outcomes and susceptibility to infectious disease. Such statistical analyses can even by used to track migration patterns.