Genetics in the News

Olga Dudchenko, with the Aiden Laboratory, was named one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review for her work in creating a faster and cheaper way to sequence a genome.

A potentially disease-modifying therapy for osteoarthritis (OA) has reached a key milestone. A U.S. patent has been issued for FX201, a gene-therapy product candidate licensed by Flexion Therapeutics based on work led by Baylor College of Medicine researchers.

In a report published in Genome Biology, Dr. Robert Waterland and his team have identified special regions of the genome where a blood sample can be used to infer epigenetic regulation throughout the body, allowing scientists to test for epigenetic causes of disease

In a study that appears in Bioinformatics, a team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine has developed a new bioinformatics tool that analyzes CRISPR pooled screen data and identifies candidates for potentially relevant genes with greater sensitivity and accuracy than other existing methods. 

A multi-institutional study, published in Cell, supports comprehensive characterization of tumor tissues as a means to guide further research leading to early diagnostic strategies and new treatments.

The National Institutes of Health Common Funds Extracellular RNA Communication Consortium, which includes researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, created the exRNA Atlas resource, the first detailed catalog of human exRNAs in bodily fluids. The study that details this resource appears in the journal Cell.

Dr. Hsiao-Tuan Chao, assistant professor of pediatrics and molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine has been named the newest McNair Scholar.

In a study in Molecular Cell, researchers in the Rosenberg lab at Baylor College of Medicine, reveal how bacteria evolve mutations that lead to antibiotic resistance and that this process can be hindered with an FDA-approved drug.

In a study appearing in Cell, a group of researchers in the Lupski Lab at Baylor College of Medicine have discovered that there is much more to 17p11.2 syndromes than deletions and duplications.

In a study, published in Science, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medicine showed that consuming a daily modest amount of high-fructose corn syrup accelerates the growth of intestinal tumors in APC-model mice. 

A collaborative study led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute of Texas Children’s Hospital improves our understanding of how amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, develops.

In a study published in a February issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital, found another mechanism involved in the development of Tuberous Sclerosis. 

Dr. Meng Wang and her colleagues report in the January issue of Developmental Cell, the discovery of an intracellular pathway that mediates metabolic adjustments that promote health and longevity in the worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. 

A team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine has discovered that breast cancer cells can shift between two forms of the cell surface molecule CD44: CD44s and CD44v.

A team led by researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and University of Texas at Austin applied an unconventional approach that used bacteria to discover human proteins that can lead to DNA damage and promote cancer. Reported in the journal Cell, the study also proposes biological mechanisms by which these proteins can cause damage to DNA, opening possibilities for future cancer treatments.