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Bovine genome assembledThe first draft of the bovine genome sequence has been deposited into free public databases for use by biomedical and agricultural researchers around the globe, according to leaders of the Bovine Genome Sequencing Project. Contributors to the $53 million international effort to sequence the genome of the cow (Bos taurus) include: the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health; the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service; the state of Texas; Genome Canada through Genome British Columbia, The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization of Australia; Agritech Investments Ltd., Dairy Insight, Inc. and AgResearch Ltd., all of New Zealand; the Kleberg Foundation; and the National, Texas and South Dakota Beef Check-off Funds. A team led by Richard Gibbs, PhD, at Baylor College of Medicine's Human Genome Sequencing Center in Houston carried out the sequencing and assembly of the genome. Additional work aimed at uncovering more detailed information about individual bovine genes - a process referred to as full-length cDNA sequencing - is being conducted by a team led by Marco Marra, PhD, at the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver. Researchers can access the sequence data through the following public databases: GenBank at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), EMBL Bank at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database and the DNA Data Bank of Japan. The data will also be viewable through NCBI's Map Viewer, UCSC Genome Browser at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Ensembl Genome Browser at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge , England. In addition to helping medical researchers learn more about the human genome and thereby develop better ways of treating and preventing disease, the bovine genome sequence will serve as a tool for agricultural researchers striving to improve health and disease management of cattle and enhance the nutritional value of beef and dairy products.
Mending a broken heart . . . with stem cellsA $6 million, five-year grant from the Parisian Fondation Leduq has set up a transatlantic effort to study ways to help damaged hearts repair themselves, using stem cells from bone marrow, bloodstream, and adult heart tissue. Michael Schneider, MD, professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, is the U.S. coordinator of the program, which will involve European and American scientists and physicians in Frankfurt, Rome, and Houston. Schneider and Robert Schwartz, PhD, co-directors of BCM's Center for Cardiovascular Development, both are members of the research effort, dubbed the "Transatlantic Network of Excellence for Cardiac Regeneration." The research will start with determining the source of these stem cells for the heart early in life. It will progress to engineering the cells to enhance their ability to repair damaged heart muscle, and then to study the effects of such optimized cells in patients. Coordinating the European efforts will be Dr. Stefanie Dimmeler, director of molecular cardiology at the J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. Other members of the network are her collaborator Dr. Andreas Zeiher at the same institution, stem cell biologist Dr. Giulio Cossu of the Stem Cell Research Institute San Raffaele in Milan, Italy and mouse geneticist Nadia Rosenthal, head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory at Monterotondo (near Rome, Italy).
Stent registryA nationwide registry led by Baylor College of Medicine will shed more light on why some interventional arterial devices perform better than others at preventing heart attacks. The study evaluates the efficacy of all stents approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Stents are wire mesh tubes designed to prevent arteries from re-clogging. "Currently, it is not clear if certain stents will prevent more traumatic cardiovascular events from happening or whether they cause more acute complications in the hope of preventing long-term re-narrowing of blood vessels," said Neal Kleiman, MD, associate professor of cardiology and principal investigator of the leading registry site at BCM. The comprehensive registry, called EVENT (Evaluation of Drug Eluting Stents and Ischemic Events), expects to enroll 7,500-10,000 patients in approximately 60 test sites nationwide. The registry differs from clinical studies by evaluating consecutively treated patients, rather than a selected group. The registry will test bare-metal, drug-eluting, and cobalt-chromium alloy stents, and is sponsored by Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Schering-Plough Corporation.
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