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Prescription Drug Patches Gaining Ground, Tackling New Therapies

Created as an alternate route of drug administration to improve patient compliance and reduce drug side effects, prescription skin patches are rapidly becoming an important healthcare product category. While quietly gaining market share for the treatment of chronic conditions such as angina, hypertension and HRT, the technology is set to make further inroads as transdermal patches for a host of n...

Prescription pain patch abuse blamed for increase in deaths

Drug abusers are increasingly turning to a slow-release form of a powerful painkiller for a quick and dangerous high, University of Florida researchers warn. The trend is raising alarm as the number of people dying from an overdose of the drug fentanyl, an opioid 100 times more potent than morphine, rises. Addicts are misusing a clear patch that transfers a controlled dose of fentanyl thro...

Modification of program enables prediction of gene transcription

A modification to an "ace" gene prediction program by computer scientists at Washington University in St. Louis now enables scientists to predict the very beginnings of gene transcription start sites and where the first splice occurs thereby defining the first exon of the gene. The modification to the gene prediction software TWINSCAN is called N-SCAN. Michael Brent, Ph.D. professor of com...

NYU chemists use computer simulation to enhance understanding of DNA transcription

New York University chemists have employed a computer simulation whose results have enhanced scientific understanding of the DNA transcription process. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, appears in the June 7 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Previous research has indicated that chromatin--a chromosome's substance consisting of histone prote...

Solexa and collaborating scientists illuminate the small RNA component of the transcriptome

Solexa, Inc. (Nasdaq: SLXA) today announced that its researchers in collaboration with the Delaware Biotechnology Institute and the University of Delaware reported the most comprehensive analysis to date of the small RNA component of the transcriptome. The research, "Elucidation of the Small RNA Component of the Transcriptome," was published in the September 2, 2005 issue of the peer-reviewed jou...

Mammalian Transcriptome Mapped

The FANTOM Consortium for Genome Exploration Research Group, a large international collection of scientists that includes researchers at The Scripps Research Institute's Florida campus, is reporting the results of a massive multi-year project to map the mammalian "transcriptome" in this week's issue of the journal Science. The transcriptome, or transcriptional landscape as it is sometimes...

Discovering the first steps in transcription-coupled repair

A team of scientists led by Priscilla Cooper, a senior staff scientist in the Life Sciences Division of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has discovered new players in the first steps of transcription-coupled repair (TCR), an essential but still mysterious mechanism of DNA repair. If a blockage occurs when genetic information from a cell's DNA is being trans...

Earth Rx: A microbial biotechnology prescription for global environmental health

Water. Waste. Energy. This trio of problems is among the greatest challenges to the environmental health of society. Water purification alone is becoming more problematic in the world due to our increasingly reliance on contaminated sources, such as polluted rivers, lakes and groundwater. "All of these issues are closely interrelated," says Bruce Rittmann, director of the Center for En...

Tandem transcripts team together

In the January issue of the journal , two teams of scientists describe a widespread phenomenon in the human genome called transcription-induced chimerism (TIC), where two adjacent genes produce a single, fused RNA transcript. The work has implications for drug development, as well as for understanding mechanisms underlying gene evolution, transcription regulation, and genom...

Efficiency, not more doctors, is the prescription for aging population

Recent news reports that threaten a shortage of doctors to treat the burgeoning elderly population are wrong, according to researchers at Dartmouth Medical School's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS). In a study published in the March/April issue of Health Affairs, they argue that if employed efficiently, the current supply of physicians and medical students will be adequate thro...

Psychotropic drug prescriptions for teens surge 250 percent over 7 year period

Psychotropic drug prescriptions for teenagers skyrocketed 250 percent between 1994 and 2001, rising particularly sharply after 1999, when the federal government allowed direct-to-consumer advertising and looser promotion of off-label use of prescription drugs, according to a new Brandeis University study in the journal Psychiatric Services. This dramatic increase in adolescent visits to h...

MatBase -- A new transcription factor knowledge base released by Genomatix

Genomatix Software GmbH, a pioneer and leader in the analysis of eukaryotic transcriptional regulation, releases MatBase, a knowledge base of transcription factors (TF). It contains genomic TF binding sites and protein binding domains, related literature, more than 27.000 known TF ?gene interactions, experimentally verified complexes with other TFs (promoter modules), and weight matrix de...

When it comes to gene transcription, random pauses aren’t quite so random, study finds

Of the thousands of proteins produced in our cells, few are as important as the enzyme RNA polymerase (RNAP), which has the unique ability to faithfully copy genetic information from DNA. In fact, all organisms--from bacteria to people--depend on RNAP to initiate the complex process of protein synthesis. Despite its crucial role in cell biology, fundamental questions remain about how the RNAP enz...

Non-coding RNAs help silence the mammalian transcription

Dr. Shirley Tilghman and colleagues (Princeton University) lend new insight into the mechanism of genomic imprinting, demonstrating a necessary role for a non-coding RNA transcript in the silencing of an imprinted gene cluster in mice. Imprinting, or the differential expression of a gene based upon which parent it has been inherited from, is integral to normal growth and development. Two h...

Nanotech tools yield DNA transcription breakthrough

Rutgers researcher Richard H. Ebright and his collaborators have resolved key questions regarding transcription, the fundamental life process that was the subject of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Transcription is the first step in the process cells employ to read and carry out the out instructions contained in genes. Transcription is carried out by a molecular machine known as RNA po...

Stability of mRNA/DNA and DNA/DNA duplexes modulates mRNA transcription

The distribution of the four nucleotides along the DNA sequence encodes the genetic information in living systems. However, do nucleic acids possess other attributes that contribute to their biological functions? Recent work of a team led by Stoyno Stoynov, working at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, suggests that thermodynamic stability of DNA/DNA and RNA/DNA duplexes influences mRNA transcrip...