Mind the Gaps
02/04/12 12:26 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Mon, 04/02/2012 - 16:23.
The Daniel MacArthur et al. study confirms what many others and I have suspected for some time, i.e that the genomes of healthy people can harbour many defective tumour suppressor genes without any manifestation of cancer. It is likely that they might also have activated oncogenes, which alone are insufficient to induce full neoplastic transformation. Apparently, compensatory changes in protein expression and post-translation modifications such as phosphorylation, particularly in regulatory proteins, can successfully offset many genetic defects.
Another recent study that was just published in the journal Science Translational Medicine from Bert Voglestein and his colleagues with 53,666 identical twins in registries from the United States and Europe is also insightful in this regard. In this study, the twins were analyzed for their affliction with 24 different diseases and it turns out that despite similar if not identical genome sequences, there were no increased risk in the codevelopment of the 24 individual diseases in the twins then what was seen when compared to the general population.
Link to the original blog post.
The Daniel MacArthur et al. study confirms what many others and I have suspected for some time, i.e that the genomes of healthy people can harbour many defective tumour suppressor genes without any manifestation of cancer. It is likely that they might also have activated oncogenes, which alone are insufficient to induce full neoplastic transformation. Apparently, compensatory changes in protein expression and post-translation modifications such as phosphorylation, particularly in regulatory proteins, can successfully offset many genetic defects.
Another recent study that was just published in the journal Science Translational Medicine from Bert Voglestein and his colleagues with 53,666 identical twins in registries from the United States and Europe is also insightful in this regard. In this study, the twins were analyzed for their affliction with 24 different diseases and it turns out that despite similar if not identical genome sequences, there were no increased risk in the codevelopment of the 24 individual diseases in the twins then what was seen when compared to the general population.
Link to the original blog post.