Free Republic

Edward M. Marcotte is looking for drugs that can kill tumors by stopping blood vessel growth, and he and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin recently found some good targets — five human genes that are essential for that growth. Now they’re hunting for drugs that can stop those genes from working. Strangely, though, Dr. Marcotte did not discover the new genes in the human genome, nor in lab mice or even fruit flies. He and his colleagues found the genes in yeast. “On the face of it, it’s just crazy,” Dr. Marcotte said. After all, these...

Plants shed light on disfigured faces, and yeast and blood vessels find common ground. The search for models of human diseases might just have become easier, thanks to a data-mining technique that screens genetic databases to find subtle links to organisms as distant from humans as plants. The new tool integrates information from existing databases that associate gene mutations with observable traits in a range of species, including humans, mice, yeast, worms and plants. And the method identifies genes in the non-human species that are more likely than by chance to contribute to human disease. Mutations in the same gene...