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Enlarge Image Responder. Tumors in a patient's lung (top), lymph nodes, and liver shrank over 8 months after he received an epigenetic drug combination. He is alive 2 years later. Credit: Adapted from R. A. Juergens et al., Cancer Discovery (December 2011), © American Association for Cancer Research A novel approach to treating lung cancer that aims to switch on dormant tumor-blocking genes has shown promise in a small clinical trial. The 45 patients on average lived a couple months longer than they would have with no treatment, and two patients' tumors almost or completely disappeared. The results suggest that...

Obesity is on the rise in nations across the globe, and more than diet and genetics may be to blame. A new study suggests a third factor is at work: DNA-binding molecules that can be passed down from mother to child in the womb. The finding could explain why what a woman eats while pregnant can sometimes influence the weight of her child—even into adulthood. Scientists first began to suspect that a mother’s diet could affect the weight of her offspring in 1976. Studying the Dutch famine of 1945, when the German army cut off food supplies to western Holland,...

Stem cells made from mature cells and rewound to an embryonic-like state retain a distinct "memory" of their past that might limit their potential for therapeutic use, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. [...] They looked at 1.2 billion places in each genome where such chemical markers [epigenomes] exist. The analysis was unusually rigorous — and therefore unusually revealing, Ecker said. Earlier studies examined representative regions in the genome, rather than the whole thing. [...] For the most part, the contents of Ecker's metaphorical rooms looked alike. But when they zoomed in, inconsistencies emerged. In a side-by-side comparison of...

Scientists at The University of Nottingham have brought cancer cells back under normal control — by reactivating their cancer suppressor genes. The discovery could form a powerful new technology platform for the treatment of cancer of the breast and other cancers. Breast cancer is diagnosed in about 1.4 million women throughout the world every year, with half a million dying from the disease. A common cause of cancer is when cells are altered or mutated and the body’s tumour suppressor genes are switched off. Research, published today in the Journal Molecular Cancer, reveals how Dr Cinzia Allegrucci from the School...

When it comes to our expanding waistlines, we usually blame either diet or genes. But a new study fingers a third culprit: chemicals that attach to DNA and change its function. A survey of millions of these modifications has uncovered a handful associated with body mass index, a measure of height and weight. Although the findings don't prove that the modifications cause obesity, they may one day help doctors better predict who should be counting their calories. The chemicals in question are known as methyl groups, and they act a bit like volume knobs on our DNA. They can turn...

ANAHEIM, CA – In studies on cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders and other degenerative conditions, some scientists are moving away from the "nature versus nurture" debate, and are finding you're not a creature of either genetics or environment, but both - with enormous implications for a new approach to health. The new field of "epigenetics" is rapidly revealing how people, plants and animals do start with a certain genetic code at conception. But, the choice of which genes are "expressed," or activated, is strongly affected by environmental influences. The expression of genes can change quite rapidly over time, they can...

While cancer victims usually blame themselves - I shouldn't have smoked, should have eaten better, should have exercised - or the cruelty of chance, they may now have a new scapegoat: Grandma. Eating poorly during pregnancy can increase your children's and your grandchildren's risk of cancer, even if they themselves eat healthily, a new study on rats suggests. The risk associated with high-fat diets, especially those high in omega-6 fatty acids, "can be passed from one generation to another without any further exposure," said lead researcher Sonia de Assis of Georgetown University. > This should not imply that fat causes...

What if Darwin's theory of natural selection is inaccurate? What if the way you live now affects the life expectancy of your descendants?

Scientists are increasingly becoming aware of a new mechanism by which pollutants can damage the health of living organisms -- epigenetic changes, in which a chemical changes how a gene is expressed......Like mutations, epigenetic effects can be passed on to a person's offspring......"There is a huge potential impact from these exposures, partly because the changes may be inherited across generations,"...

COLLEGE STATION – A gene commonly studied by cancer researchers has been linked to the metabolic inflammation that leads to diabetes. Understanding how the gene works means scientists may be closer to finding ways to prevent or cure diabetes, according to a study by Texas AgriLife Research appearing in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. "Because we understand the mechanism, or how the gene works, we believe a focus on nutrition will find the way to both prevent and reverse diabetes," said Dr. Chaodong Wu, AgriLife Research nutrition and food scientist who authored the paper with the University of Minnesota's Dr....

A new concept making its way through the scientific community holds that just a few key changes in the right genes will result in a whole new life form as different from its progenitor as a bird is from a lizard![1] This idea is being applied to a number of key problems in the evolutionary model, one of which is the lack of transitional forms in both the fossil record and the living (extant) record. The new concept supposedly adds support to the "punctuated equilibrium" model proposed by the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. Dr. Gould derived his ideas...

“Junk” DNA Discovered to Have Both Cellular and Microevolutionary Functions Evolutionists have long sought mechanisms for the origin of reproductive barriers between populations, mechanisms which are thought to be key to the formation of new species. A recent article in ScienceDaily finds that “Junk DNA” might be the “mechanism that prevents two species from reproducing.” Basically, so-called “junk”-DNA is involved in helping to package chromosomes in the cell. If two species have different “junk” DNA, then this prevents the proteins in the egg from properly packaging the chromosomes donated by the sperm. The organism does not develop properly. As the...

Life is not a naturalistic phenomenon with unlimited evolutionary potential as Darwin proposed. It is intelligently designed, ruled by immutable laws, and survives only because it has a built-in facilitated variation mechanism for continually adapting to internal and external challenges and changes. The essential components are: functional molecular architecture and machinery, modular switching cascades that control the machinery and a signal network that coordinates everything. All three are required for survival, so they must have been present from the beginning—a conclusion that demands intelligent design. Life’s built-in ability to adapt and diversify looks like Darwinian evolution, but it is not....

The Human Methylome: What Do These Patterns Mean? by Brian Thomas, M.S.* For decades, researchers have noticed that tiny chemicals called “methyl groups” piggyback on DNA molecules, and that they occur in certain patterns. Intrigued by the meaning and function of methylation patterns, especially as they relate to medicine, a five-year, $ 190-million-dollar research effort funded by the National Institutes of Health began in 2008. In one of its studies, researchers have stumbled upon a new intricacy of cell function.Joseph Ecker of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies led a collaboration to generate the world’s first complete map of human...

In a Commentary essay, Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld provide an analysis of biological thought that differs profoundly from that presented by those celebrating the Bicentenary of Darwin's birth and, incidentally, the recently published AP Biology Standards. "This is the story of how biology of the 20th century neglected and otherwise mishandled the study of what is arguably the most important problem in all of science: the nature of the evolutionary process. This problem [ . . ] became the private domain of a quasi-scientific movement, who secreted it away in a morass of petty scholasticism, effectively disguising the fact...

A buildup of chemical bonds on certain cancer-promoting genes, a process known as hypermethylation, is widely known to render cells cancerous by disrupting biological brakes on runaway growth. Now, Johns Hopkins scientists say the reverse process — demethylation — which wipes off those chemical bonds may also trigger more than half of all cancers. One potential consequence of the new research is that demethylating drugs now used to treat some cancers may actually cause new cancers as a side effect. "It's much too early to say for certain, but some patients could be at risk for additional primary tumors, and...

Victims of childhood abuse can carry chemical changes to their DNA into adulthood.Punchstock Suicide victims with a history of abuse during childhood are more likely to carry chemical changes to their DNA that could affect how they respond to stress as adults, a study has found. Those with no history of childhood abuse did not show the same pattern of DNA modification, and had normal expression of NR3C1, a gene linked to stress responses. But the findings do not mean that the effect of childhood abuse is indelible, cautions Joan Kaufman, a psychologist at Yale School of Medicine in New...

The genetic puppeteer by David White Back in 2005 a group of researchers published a landmark study on a question that has long puzzled geneticists: why aren’t identical twins … identical? Considering that they have the same DNA sequence in each of their cells, it seems a bit strange that they often possess a number of physical differences, such as different fingerprints, and different susceptibilities to disease. This raises the question: if two people can have identical DNA sequences and yet be so different, is there more to our genetic blueprint than just DNA?...

Epigenetics: More Information than Evolution Can Handle by Brian Thomas, M.S. Living things develop partly according to genetic instructions encoded on their DNA. The study of inheritance has widened the paradigms from genes to genomes, and now recent research has added yet another player to the field. Critical biological information is carried from one generation to the next in systems additional to DNA, called epigenetic factors, say scientists at the Canadian Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Medical doctor Art Petronis and his team at the CAMH compared methylated DNA patterns (possible epigenetic factors) across the entire genome of...

One study finds tissue-specific methylation signatures in the genome; another a similarity between identical twins in DNA’s chemical tagging Tattoos on the skin can say a lot about person. On a deeper level, chemical tattoos on a person’s DNA are just as distinctive and individual — and say far more about a person’s life history. A pair of reports published online January 18 in Nature Genetics show just how important one type of DNA tattoo, called methylation, can be. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University report the unexpected finding that most DNA methylation — a chemical alteration that turns off genes...