NATURE: 6. 6. 2013

NATURE: Biotechnology: Genomics and us

"Michael Rawlins examines a call for biotechnology to be geared towards public health."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v498/n7452/full/498034a.html

NATURE: Geneticists push for global data-sharing

"It is a paradox that bedevils genomic medicine: despite near-universal agreement that doctors and geneticists should exchange more data, there has been scant movement towards achieving this goal. Now, a consortium of 69 institutions in 13 countries hopes to address the problem by creating an organization to enable the free flow of information in genomic medicine. On 5 June, the consortium, which is calling itself the ‘global alliance’, announced that the organization will develop standards and policies to encourage data-sharing of a person’s DNA sequence combined with clinical information. The alliance’s founders are basing their model on the World Wide Web Consortium, which in the 1990s established standards for the programming language HTML and spurred the growth of web pages across the Internet. (...)"

http://www.nature.com/news/geneticists-push-for-global-data-sharing-1.13133

SCIENCE: How Do Organs Know When They Have Reached the Right Size?

"Developmental biologists have found dozens of proteins and genes that play a role in the growth of plants and animals. But how growing organs and organisms can sense their size and know when to stop is still a mystery. Developmental biologists continue to explore that mystery, and the current objects of their attention are imaginal discs, flattened sacs of cells that grow during fruit flies' larval stages. Scientists can also change the rate at which imaginal disc cells divide, prompting either too many or not enough cells to form, but the cell size adjusts so that organ size remains the same. How does a developing organ somehow senses the mechanical forces on its growing and dividing cells?"

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6137/1156.2.summary

SCIENCE: How Does Fetal Environment Influence Later Health?

"These days, there's broad agreement that the fetal world, the most rapid period of human growth and development, shapes one's risk of future disease, although how much influence it has remains uncertain. A key missing link is in the mechanism. What switches in the fetus, or the placenta that nourishes it, are flipped by a mother's diet or stress levels? In other words, how does fetal environment mold development? No matter what the stressor on the fetus, studies of people and animals suggest that the output is similar: a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, insulin resistance, and high blood pressure."

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6137/1160.summary