Mapping

International HapMap consortium expands mapping effort

The International HapMap Consortium, boosted by an additional $3.3 million in public-private support, today announced plans to create an even more powerful map of human genetic variation than originally envisioned. The map will accelerate the discovery of genes related to common diseases, such as asthma, cancer, diabetes and heart disease. When the project was launched in October 2002, th...

Computational Method Speeds Mapping of Cell Signaling Networks

For decades, scientists have been studying how external information gets transmitted from outside of cells to the control centers inside them that trigger particular responses. But cell signaling networks are so complex that mapping them has been a slow, arduous process. Now, a research team from Stanford, MIT and Harvard has developed a new method for charting cellular signaling networks...

Brain-mapping technique aids understanding of sleep, wakefulness

The power of a new technique to map connections among nerve cells in the brain has a UT Southwestern Medical Center scientist dreaming of solving the mysteries of sleep. By tracking which nerve cells in the mouse brain stimulate others, researchers in Japan and at UT Southwestern found that a type of neuron responsible for keeping animals awake receives inhibitory signals from neurons act...

Whole genome promoter mapping - Human Genome Project v2.0?

Investigators from the University California, San Diego (UCSD) Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) and NimbleGen Systems have developed an efficient method to identify thousands of regulatory sequences in the human genome, according to a study published today in Nature. Genes are defined by their ability to generate a functional product. Thus the 'promoter' - a DNA se...

Mapping neuron connections in the brain

The human brain contains from 10 to 100 billion neurons, and each has hundreds of connections with neighboring neurons. Making sense of these intricate connections is essential to understanding brain function, and the task is a monumental one. Thanks to a new theoretical approach to mapping neuron connectivity published in PLoS Computational Biology by Bagrat Amirikian, a researcher at the...

Mapping alcohol brain damage

UQ biochemists are working with American researchers to pinpoint why only some parts of the brain are damaged in alcoholics. Chronic alcohol...

Mapping the protein world

In the early days of X-ray crystallography obtaining a three-dimensional model of a protein required wire models, screws, bolts and years of tedious calculations by hand. Today macromolecular models are built by computers ?thanks to sophisticated software and in particular a package called ARP/wARP. Developed by Victor Lamzin at the Hamburg Outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory...

Mapping the mouse genome

In a new study published online this week in the open access journal PLoS Biology, Sagiv Shifman, Jonathan Flint, and colleagues present a high resolution genetic map for the mouse genome--one of the most detailed genetic maps now available aside from that for humans. To create this map, they used two groups of mice: one consisting of outbred, heterogeneous stock (HS) and the other of re...