This is such a cool application of genetics! By sequencing all the genes of a patient, scientists diagnosed a congenital disease that could not be identified using clinical observations. Because of the “molecular diagnostics technique”, doctors were able to provide a treatment tailored for the disease.
  The patient, an infant, was persistently dehydrated and failing to gain weight, and researchers uncovered a gene mutation that was responsible to the infant’s condition called congenital chloride diarrhea. Instead of sequencing all the thousand base pairs in a genome, researchers focused only on DNA that encodes proteins, about 1% of the total …read more

P52 gene, arrows show locations of common mutations 
(Image courtesy www.bioinf.org)
Following on from my last article on using gene therapy for increasing survival in head and neck cancer, Professor Jack Roth, M.D., professor in M. D. Anderson’s Department of Thoracic & Cardiovascular Surgery and colleagues are now focusing on ways to deliver p53 and other tumor-suppressing genes systemically – through intravenous delivery.
The p53 gene is inactivated in many types of cancer. Its normal role is to halt the division of a defective cell and then force the cell to kill itself.
Advexin has to be injected straight into the tumor, but that’s not …read more

(Carbon nanotube picture credit: www.bbc.co.uk/news)
Carbon nanotubes – the epitome of the nanotechnology industry – have been found to trigger diseases similar to asbestos in research undertaken on mice including lesions and inflammation.  Use of asbestos triggered a pandemic of lung disease in the 20th Century.
These tiny carbon molecules have remarkable properties that could be used for advanced electronics and materials including medical diagnostics.  They are already known to be incorporated into products such as tennis rackets, bicycle handlebars and baseball bats, where they are used because of their strength and light weight.
In a series of experiments, researchers injected different lengths of …read more

GNA 
(Source: John Chaput, University of Arizona)
Nanotechnology researchers are continually on the lookout for new building blocks to push innovation and discovery to scales much smaller than the tiniest speck of dust.  At present DNA nanotechnology researchers are basically limited by what they can buy off the shelf.
In the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, researchers led by John Chaput, are building synthetic molecules that assemble like DNA, but have additional properties not found in natural DNA.  It’s called GNA. In the case of GNA, the sugar is the only difference with DNA. The five carbon sugar commonly found in DNA, called …read more

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists and others have revealed for the first time the electronic structure of single DNA molecules.  In their work, the researchers were able to decode the electronic structure of DNA and to understand how the electrons distribute into the various parts of the double helix, a result that has been pursued by scientists for many years, but was previously hindered by technical problems.
The knowledge that has been acquired in this project may also be relevant for current attempts to develop new sophisticated, reliable, faster and cheaper ways to decode the sequence of human DNA.
Finding the …read more