Molecular Awards

  The study found that common genetic variants can speed up or slow down this process by up to fourfold, and that certain expanded sequences are linked to serious diseases including kidney failure and liver disease. Why it matters More than 60 inherited disorders are caused by expanded DNA repeats: repetitive genetic sequences that grow longer over time. These include devastating conditions like Huntington's disease, myotonic dystrophy, and certain forms of ALS. Most people carry DNA repeats that gradually expand throughout their lives, but this instability and what genetic factors control it hadn’t been fully analyzed within large biobanks. This study demonstrates that DNA repeat expansion is far more widespread than previously recognized and identifies dozens of genes that regulate this process, opening new avenues for developing treatments that could slow disease progression. What the study did Researchers from UCLA, the Broad Institute, and Harvard Medical School analyzed whole...

  When does that seasonal suntan become a risk for melanoma? At what point could those extra pounds trigger diabetes? Could severe head injuries tip one over into Alzheimer’s disease? In the larger scheme of things, the risk factors include genetics, lifestyle and age, with the answers often only coming after the unfortunate diagnoses.   However, a record of the physical slights, injuries, bad choices we make and abuses we experience exists as stress at a cellular level. UC Santa Barbara researchers have found a way to map this cellular “stress memory landscape,” which interprets the stresses that cells have already undergone and predicts the cells’ future reaction to stressors.   “We’ve developed a platform that could allow us to eventually figure out how all stress-related diseases occur,” said molecular biologist   Max Wilson,  a senior author of a paper that appears on the cover the journal Cell System. In addition to demystifying the onset of cellular ...

  Cancer drug resistance is the devastating reason that treatments fail and cancers metastasize, spreading to distant sites seeding new resistant tumors elsewhere in the body. Combating the problem has become the singular enterprise of some cancer research laboratories, which have been seeking the myriad causes of drug resistance and searching for methods to thwart them. At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, scientists who had been searching for elusive signaling pathways that underpin drug resistance in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma not only found them, but traced them to another molecular mechanism that insidiously sustains drug resistance. As scientific sleuths, the team relied on information theory, a branch of applied mathematics, to aid their hunt for errant molecules that help drive drug resistance in cancer. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is the most common form of the disease, affecting up to 90% of people diagnosed with the cancer, according to the U.S. N...