Archive for the ‘Male Genetics’ Category

"Having sex weekly may delay your menopause: Scientists say not getting enough action 'makes the body choose to stop ovulating'," reports the Mail Online.

Women enter the menopause when they stop releasing eggs, usually in their 40s or 50s. Some of the timing seems to be down to genetics, while lifestyle factors such as smoking are also important.

This study was designed to test the theory that women's bodies may stop releasing eggs when the body senses that a woman is no longer likely to get pregnant for example because she is no longer having sex.

The researchers also wanted to look into a theory that exposure to male pheromones (for example, from living with men) delays menopause.

Researchers analysed information about 2,936 women in their 40s and 50s who lived in the US. The women answered questions about their health, lifestyle, who else lived in their household, and their sexual activity. They were followed up for 10 years.

The researchers found that women were less likely to have gone through the menopause if they had weekly sex. However, the study only shows a link between how often women had sex and their age at menopause. It cannot prove that having more sex directly causes a later menopause.

The researchers did not find any evidence that exposure to male pheromones was linked to timing of the menopause.

Find out more about the menopause.

The researchers who carried out the study were from University College London.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Royal Society Open Medicine on an open access basis, meaning it is free to read online.

Most of the media headlines suggested that regular sex could delay the menopause, or reduce risk of an early menopause. But the study only shows a link between sexual activity and timing of menopause, not that sexual activity can actually delay menopause.

The news stories themselves gave a more accurate picture of the research, although none pointed out that early menopausal symptoms can affect how likely a woman is to want to have sex.

This was a cohort study. Cohort studies are good ways to look for links between behavioural factors (such as sexual activity) and outcomes (such as menopause). However, they cannot tell us that one directly causes the other. The relationship may be more complex.

Researchers recruited women aged 42 to 52 in 1996 to 1997.

The 2,936 women were all pre-menopausal, although half were experiencing early signs of approaching menopause, such as hot flushes or irregular periods.

The women were asked a range of questions at the start of the study and at 10 follow-up visits over the following 10 years.

Questions included:

Researchers also checked whether the women had been through the menopause at any point during the study.They used the information to calculate:

The first question was to investigate whether menopause might be delayed by the presence of male pheromones in a woman's living space, while the second looked more directly at whether sexual activity was linked to menopause.

The researchers adjusted the results to take account of a range of factors, including:

Most of the women in the study (78%) were married or in a relationship at the start of the study, and 68% lived with their partner. 64% of the women reported weekly sexual activity.

During the study, just under half (45%) of women went through the menopause, with the average age at menopause being 52.

The researchers found no link between women living with men and the likelihood of having gone through the menopause at any point.

However, women who said they had regular sexual activity were less likely to have gone through the menopause than women who said they had sexual activity less than once a month:

The researchers explained their results in an evolutionary framework.

"During ovulation, the woman's immune function is impaired, making the body more susceptible to disease. Hence, if a pregnancy is unlikely owing to a lack of sexual activity, then it would not be beneficial to allocate energy to a costly process, especially if there is the option to invest resources into existing kin," they said.

On the other hand, if a woman is engaging in regular sex which could lead to pregnancy, "then it may be better to maintain the function of her menstrual cycle for slightly longer".

They point out that menopause is "an inevitability" that cannot be prevented by any behaviour.

Menopause, when women stop releasing eggs and are no longer able to get pregnant, happens to all women eventually. For most women, it happens during their 40s or 50s, but there is a lot of variation.

This study was an attempt to explain part of the reason for the variation in timing of menopause, looking at the question from an evolutionary perspective.

The study has limitations that mean we cannot read too much into it. As with all observational studies, it cannot tell us whether sexual activity is directly linked to age of menopause.

That's because many factors affect whether someone is having sex, and when the menopause happens. For example, if someone is experiencing anxiety or vaginal dryness both common symptoms of the menopause they may be less likely to want to have sex.

The findings of the study are interesting for scientists investigating the biology of the menopause and how it might be affected by lifestyle. But they are not particularly relevant to women. We do not know whether changing behaviour to have sex more frequently, for example, could change a woman's time of menopause.

There's no suggestion from this study that women should change their behaviour to delay menopause, even if they wanted such a delay.

Find out more about the menopause.

Analysis by BazianEdited by NHS Website

Read more:
Weekly sexual activity linked to later menopause - NHS Website

Comedy star Amy Schumer, who has rarely hesitated at sharing intimate medical issues, from her current desire for in vitro fertilization to the pregnancy-long hyperemesis vomiting she experienced while pregnant with her first child, talked IVF-related constipation Saturday at a wellness event hosted by Oprah Winfrey.

"I had my egg retrieval on Monday," the Rockville Centre-raised Schumer, 38, told media mogul Winfrey, 65, at "Oprah's 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus" at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. "Which is also the last time I pooped," Schumer added. "I said I wasn't gonna say it, but I did. Yeah, can't poop after."

In a backstage video Winfrey posted on Instagram, the comedian assures her, "I feel so much better. I can't even complain, except that I haven't pooped since Monday." Oprah gives the camera a look, and Schumer rushes to hug her. "We'll save that for the audience. We'll save that for the 15,000 people. Charlotte needs to know!" Schumer said jocularly.

In the same video, when Winfrey asks if Schumer has tried teas said to help. "I was going to do Smooth Move," the comic said, referring to one such brand. "But then I was scared it would hit while we were onstage, so I'm waiting until after." Winfrey mentions that a type of airplane Schumer will be on soon has a good bathroom. "I'll use any bathroom if it happens, the comicanswers lightheartedly. "I will not be precious about whatever bathroom!"

"Listen, I heard @amyschumer hadn't [poop emoji] and I thought it was TMI but then she told a sold-out arena about it and apparently people love to talk about [poop emoji](or not)," Winfrey wrote in an accompanying post. "Amy, thank you so much for spending your Saturday making US laugh and sharing your journey through motherhood, marriage, and yes [poop emoji]. And Charlotte, you guys were EPIC!"

The full 40-minute interview is scheduled to run Wednesday at 8 p.m. on Winfrey's Facebook channel and the WW Now Facebook channel.

According to the Mayo Clinic, in vitro fertilization consists of a series of treatments to deal with infertility or prevent genetic problems and assist with the conception of a child. IVF procedures include harvesting mature eggs from a woman and then fertilizing thosein a lab setting. The resulting embryos are then implanted inside the future mother's uterus or a gestational carrier at a later date. One cycle of IVF can take two to three weeks and more than one cycle may be required for a viable pregnancy.

Schumer, who gave birth to son Gene Attell in May, is married to celebrity chef and cookbook author Chris Fischer. She said to Winfrey during the event that she'd like to have a daughter.I picture us all on the beach together," Schumer said. "And teaching maybe a little girl how to play volleyball.

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"What an amazing day with @oprah who is still to this day making people's lives better including mine and my family's," Schumer wrote on her own Instagram account. "Check stories for some clips and the whole thing will be available Wednesday! I'm wearing @russwest44 on my feet and Charlotte was a great time! The comics I mentioned people checking out are @miacomedy @janellejamescomedy @rachelfeinstein_ @bridgeteverett @marinayfranklin @ejthecomic and @chelsanity."

By Frank Lovece Special to Newsday

Read more:
LI's Amy Schumer talks effects of IVF treatments - Newsday

Another winter of studying wolves at Isle Royale National Park is getting underway/NPS file

Editor's note: The following story was written by Allison Mills at Michigan Technological University.

On October 20, a ranger on his final hike for the season in Isle Royale National Park came across a dead wolf lying in the trail. An era ends and new packs may form.

Over the past year, the National Park Service and regional partners brought more than adozen new wolves to Isle Royaleas only two island-born wolves remained. This past fall, the park documented two wolf deaths both caused by injuries inflicted by another wolf or group of wolves. One wolf was the male of the native pair.

To help document the shifting social hierarchies of the island, the 62nd Winter Study is underway in the Isle Royale National Park led by Michigan Technological University.

Rarely do we find dead wolves unless they are radiocollared, said Rolf Peterson, a research professor in theCollege of Forest Resources and Environmental Scienceat Michigan Tech who co-leads the annual Isle Royale Winter Study. He helped park staff recover the carcass of the old male wolf, who was not radiocollared.

His death, and finding the intact body so soon after, presents an extremely rare chance to study his genetics, Peterson said. Finally, his heritage will be clear and we will have a better understanding of the Isle Royale wolf story. Also, it remains to be seen what will happen with new packs forming.

The male wolf was 11 years old and his mate, who was both his sister and daughter, is now nine years old. Based on necropsy results from the US Geological Surveys National Wildlife Health Center, the cause of death was wolf-inflicted wounds. The pair had been the last remaining wolves on the island until the National Park Service introduced new wolves from Ontario, Minnesota and Michigan; these deaths and wolf-on-wolf aggression are not uncommon as wolves defend and establish their territories and social hierarchy. There are now 15 wolves on the island seven females and eight males. The new wolves wear radio collars, so researchers track their movement as they explore the island.

The research from Isle Royale gives us a glimpse into the predator-prey dynamics and its impact on the islands ecology:isleroyalewolf.org

With her mate gone, the female wolf may seek out a new partner, whose new offspring is unlikely to fall prey to the inbred genetics that crashed the original population. In partnership with the National Parks Service, Kristin Brzeski, assistant professor of wildlife ecology and genetics at Michigan Tech, will be studying the old male wolfs genome. With an esteemed heritage his grandmother was known as the Cinderella Wolf and his great grandfather The Old Grey Guy, two important wolves within theIsle Royale family tree the males genes carry the story of genetic rescue and severe inbreeding, phenomena that are hard to study in the wild. Phil Hedrick from Arizona State University, a longtime collaborator on the Isle Royale project, will also be contributing to the research. A deeper understanding of the old packs downfall can help inform wildlife management and conservation decisions on the island and around the world.

The wolves of Isle Royale have been showing us for some time now how the life of an individual animal can affect an entire ecosystem, said John Vucetich, professor of ecology and another Winter Study co-lead. The Old Grey Guy, who came across an ice bridge and introduced new genes into the population, and Cinderella, a notable alpha who survived a pack coup, are important examples. And the recovery of this carcass from the last known male wolf of the previous population may well prove to be another important example."

If the female does not choose a new mate, a power struggle may ensue as alpha contenders emerge and new packs form. The radio-collar movement patterns reveal wolves sharing bed sites, meals and hunting grounds as well as watching one another from a distance. Or rather listening: Wolves communicate territorial boundaries and pack identity through howling.

The wolves are good at detecting vacancies, Peterson said. Anything could happen at this point. This years drama is just beginning.

The next Winter Study report is expected to come out late in winter 2020 with an update on the wolves, moose population growth and health, small mammal populations and browsing impact on vegetation.

Link:
Another Winter Of Wolf Study Begins At Isle Royale National Park - National Parks Traveler

The main factor that influences a person's height is their genetic makeup. However, many other factors can influence height during development, including nutrition, hormones, activity levels, and medical conditions.

Scientists believe that genetic makeup, or DNA, is responsible for about 80% of a person's height. This means, for instance, that tall people tend to have children who also grow up to be tall.

People usually grow until they reach 18 years of age. Before then, a range of environmental factors can affect how tall they become.

This article covers the factors that affect a person's height, some ways people can increase height during development, and whether or not adults can increase their height.

Babies and children grow continuously. This is due to changes in the growth plates in the long bones of their arms and legs.

As the growth plates make new bone, the long bones get longer, and the child gets taller.

People grow the fastest in the first 9 months of life, before being born. After birth, this slows down.

Once a child is 8 years old, they will grow at an average of 2.16 inches (in), or 5.5 centimeters (cm), per year.

That said, teenagers will have a "growth spurt" around the time of puberty. After this, the growth plates stop making new bone, and the person will stop growing. The hands and feet stop growing first, then the arms and legs. The last area to stop growing is the spine.

Due to typical aging processes, people begin to lose height gradually as they get older.

The following factors can affect how tall a person will become:

DNA is the main factor determining a person's height.

Scientists have identified more than 700 different genes that determine height. Some of these genes affect the growth plates, and others affect the production of growth hormones.

Normal height ranges are different for people from different ethnic backgrounds. Again, this is determined by their DNA.

Some genetic conditions can also affect a person's adult height, including Down syndrome and Marfan syndrome.

The body produces hormones that instruct the growth plates to make new bone. These include:

Males tend to be taller than females. Males may also continue growing for longer than females. On average, an adult male is 5.5 in (14 cm) taller than an adult female.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the United States, the average male is 69 in (175.2 cm) tall, and the average female is 63.6 in (161.5 cm) tall.

Learn about what age girls stop growing and what age boys stop growing here.

People cannot control most of the factors that influence their height. This is because they are determined by DNA, which they cannot change.

However, some factors can increase or reduce growth during childhood and puberty. Growing children and teenagers can take some steps to maximize their adult height. These include:

Nutrition plays a very important role in growth. Children without good nutrition may not be as tall as children with adequate nutrition.

Nutritionists recommend that children and young people eat a varied, balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables. This will ensure that they get all the vitamins and minerals they need to thrive.

Protein and calcium are particularly important for bone health and growth. Some protein-rich foods include:

Some calcium-rich foods include:

Ensuring good nutrition during pregnancy is also important for the bone health and growth of the fetus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommend that pregnant women consume a variety of foods, including "green and orange vegetables, meat, fish, beans, nuts, pasteurized dairy products, and fruit."

Sleep promotes growth and development in children and teenagers. During deep sleep, the body releases the hormones it needs to grow. Getting enough sleep may therefore allow optimal growth.

Regular exercise is also important for normal physical development. Playing outside or taking part in sports, for example, can make bones healthier, denser, and stronger.

Once a person has been through puberty, the growth plates stop making new bone. They fuse together, and the person stops growing. This means that when a person reaches 18 years of age, they are not able to increase their height.

Practicing good posture and keeping the back and core muscles strong can allow a person to stand straighter and appear taller.

Learn more about growing factors that affect height as an adult here.

Height is largely determined by DNA. However, environmental factors such as nutrition and exercise can affect growth during development.

As children get older, they need good nutrition and plenty of exercise to help their bodies make the hormones they need to grow. Teenagers will experience a growth spurt during puberty. After that, their bones will stop growing, and they will not get any taller.

Good nutrition during pregnancy is also important for the future bone health and growth of the baby.

Read more here:
How to increase height: Factors that influence growth - Medical News Today

For the first time in almost a decade, Suffolk County Police have released new evidence in connection with the Gilgo Beach serial killer case.

During a press conference on Thursday, Jan. 16, policereleased an image of a black leather belt with two initials that they believed could belong to the killer because it had not been touched by any of the victims.

The belt is imprinted with the letters "WH" or "HW" depending on the way the belt is turned.

Suffolk Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart saidshe hoped the release of the evidence could help identify a suspect.

"We remain steadfast in our commitment to delivering justice to the victims," Hart said.

The serial killer case was opened during the search for Shannan Gilbert, 24, a Jersey City woman who solicited for sex on Craigslist, was reported missing in May 2010.

During the search for Gilbert, a K-9 officer and his dog uncovered the remains of another missing woman who worked in the sex business in a clump of weeds along Ocean Parkway near Jones Beach in December of 2010.

Where the bodies were located near Gilgo Beach. Suffolk County Police

What followed was a mass search of the area by police that uncovered the remains of nine additional bodies, including seven women, a baby, and an adult male.

Police have only been able to identify half of the bodies, with four sets of remains including the infant and male, still unidentified.

No arrests have ever been made in connection with any of the bodies found.

Photos of some of the women found whose bodies were found at Gilgo Beach. Suffolk County Police

Police have said in the past they don't believe Gilbert's murder is connected to the serial killer due evidence they have not released.

Hart declined to say why the department is releasing the belt at this time, or what size it was.

During the conference, the department also announced a new website http://www.gilgonews.com will be used as a way for police and the public to exchange information on the investigation and as a way for the public to send in tips anonymously.

"We are asking the public to consider the information on the website and whether they have information that can bring the case forward," said Hart.

The department is also still waiting for the results of a new genetic test being used in the case in hopes of finding the killer or identifying the other bodies.

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Police Release Image Of Belt That May Belong To Serial Killer In Gilgo Beach Case - Daily Voice

Do you want to know the gender? the doctor asked me, after delivering the news of our healthy embryos.

What?

Do you want to know? Many people want to select.

I just want the healthiest embryos, I answered reflexively. The ones most likely to survive.

My doctor had just delivered the genetic testing results of our 13 embryos, created in the lab through in vitro fertilization: three healthy embryos, two girls and one boy. After multiple miscarriages, I wanted a baby who would live. I didnt care if it was a boy or a girl, with blue eyes or brown, or curly or straight hair. I wanted a baby who was breathing.

I am an accidental fertility expert. Fertility was not something I thought much about, until confronted with years of trying to conceive and the devastating pain of my first miscarriage, followed by six additional miscarriages and almost a dozen failed IVF attempts.

Over the course of nine years, I saw 10 doctors in six countries, and turned to state-of-the-art medical practices as well as traditional approaches to overcome infertility. I tried Clomid to encourage my body to ovulate, then intrauterine insemination (IUI) to assist with fertilization, followed by in vitro fertilization (IVF) to actually force it. When that failed, my husband and I turned to preimplantation genetic testing (PGS) in hopes of finding a good embryo. And when my body couldnt carry our sole healthy embryo, we finally embraced the idea of a gestational surrogate.

During the course of our years-long fertility journey, my husband and I discovered that we were part of a growing demographic of the infertile in America. Luckily for us, fertility technology is largely keeping pace, enabling the previously infertile to achieve their dreams through new approaches previously reserved for the province of science fiction. The technology is a boon its the reason we have our own children.

But it was also an exhausting process. There was the emotional trauma, physical toll and financial burdens of infertility, and, on top of that, the prospect of forging into legally complicated and morally untested territory.

When my husband and I entered the world of advanced reproductive technology, we had no thoughts of social engineering; we just wanted to have a baby. Yet society abounded with criticisms of the techniques we were employing: Gender selection will lead to people asking for blond-haired, blue-eyed babies. Women will begin using surrogates to avoid getting fat.

These are valid concerns and must be thought about carefully in crafting safe and ethical guidelines. But these slippery-slope arguments fail to convince me. Having subjected myself to uncountable injections, ultrasounds and anesthetized egg retrievals, I simply dont accept that women would opt for daily needles to create designer babies, or would choose not to carry their own baby to escape putting on weight.

People turn to these technologies because they need them to have a healthy child.

Louise Brown, the first IVF baby, was born in 1978. In the four decades since her birth, new and more powerful techniques have emerged, pushing the boundaries of human reproduction outward. But legal and ethical discussions around fertility technology have stalled, resulting in virtually no national regulation. Paired with a ban on federal research, this means aspiring parents must often assess not only the efficacy, but also the morality, of potential procedures themselves.

(Credit: Jay Smith/Discover)

For example, before considering the selection of a boy or a girl, we had to confront the question of whether we even wanted the power to choose a decision that made me uneasy. If I had gotten pregnant naturally, I wouldnt get to pick the gender. Wouldnt this be cheating?

Considering what had seemed like the technical question of whether to transfer two or three of the genetically tested, healthy embryos that cycle into a surrogate rather than me suddenly became difficult. It was more than just a science project we were talking about potentially getting another woman pregnant with two or three babies that would become our actual children, to have and raise forever. But if we transferred too few, we might end up with none. Again.

I agonized all night.Could I handle triplets? Was that fair to Catherine, our surrogate?

I neednt have worried. By the time we got to the clinic the morning after receiving the news, the male embryo was no longer viable, and the two females were loaded in the catheter to be transferred. Wed avoided an uncomfortable choice for the time.

But these questions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fertility technology.

A few of the dilemmas hopeful parents must wrestle with: What makes a parent a parent? The person who provides the genetic material? The woman who carries the baby? The individuals who commissioned the birth? (In our case, we carefully chose a jurisdiction in which we were confident that, as the genetic parents, we would be recognized as the legal parents. But thats not true everywhere.)

Is it morally acceptable to select an embryo for certain traits, like gender? (While we opted not to, people do every day).To create a baby who is a perfect genetic match to save the life of another through bone marrow or organ donation? (If we have the technology, some argue, why not?)

These are hard questions, with no easy answers. Yet future aspiring parents will likely have to deal with still harder choices, as even more disruptive breakthroughs are on the horizon.

Mitochondrial replacement therapy, in which the nucleus of the mothers egg is removed and injected into a healthy donor egg to avoid certain genetic diseases, was used to create a so-called three-parent baby for the first time in Ukraine in 2017; more are likely to follow. And, in 2018, a Chinese researcher used the gene editing technology CRISPR to edit the genomes of twin girls when they were still embryos to protect them from HIV a move that was widely condemned as premature. Both techniques irrevocably alter the germ line, meaning that any changes are passed down to future generations.

With the rapid evolution of technology, policymakers can no longer ignore the reality that human reproduction is quickly changing. Legislators must step up to the task of delineating clear rules for parents, doctors and scientists. This includes guidance on parental rights, how many embryos may be transferred during IVF, how many babies may come from a single donor, and, perhaps most importantly, a framework for evaluating the safety, efficacy and morality of emerging techniques, such as gene editing.In the absence of guideposts, doctors and patients alike will face literally life-changing decisions about how far they are willing to go to create a much-desired child.

While the medical community debates these difficult issues, science will, in all likelihood, continue to forge ahead. The very real ethical dilemmas involved in allowing trace amounts of another womans DNA to be incorporated into an embryo or genes to be edited before birth notwithstanding, I suspect that new parents have a different perspective on the issue. They are, in all likelihood, simply marveling at their 21st-century miracle babies, and the many paths that can lead them to having the family of their dreams.

Elizabeth Katkin is the author of Conceivability: What I Learned Exploring the Frontiers of Fertility

This story is part of "The Future of Fertility" a new series in Discover exploring the frontiers of reproduction.

Read more:

Can Humans Have Babies in Space?

George Church Wants to Make Genetic Matchmaking a Reality

Human Gene Editing is Controversial. Shoukhrat Mitalipov Isn't Deterred

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My Long and Arduous Journey Across the Frontiers of Fertility Technology - Discover Magazine

This article contains spoilers forRuins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth #1.

It seems the classicX-Men villain Mr. Sinister is an expert on aspects of magic as well as mutation. Born Nathaniel Essex, Sinister was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who theorized that evolution didn't always happen incrementally. He was shunned for his views, not to mention his unorthodox experiments, which horrified the British Royal Society.

An unfortunate encounter with Apocalypse left Nathaniel Essex transformed him into an ageless and immortal being. He traveled the globe, fascinated by humanity's potential to develop and evolve. The X-Men comics have long hinted at the kind of unethical experiments he conducted on mutants; in fact, Sinister meddled with Charles Xavier's own bloodline, foreseeing greatness in the genetic potential of the Xaviers.

Related:Wolverine's Biggest X-MEN Reboot Mystery Has Been Solved

Ruins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth #1 by Frank Tieri, Guillermo Sanna, Angel Unzueta, and Gerardo Sandovalreveals that Sinister's earliest experiments weren't upon mutants. In the early 1900s, he recognized the potential of the newly-opened Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane and moved to America in order to work there. While at Ravencroft, his focus was upon mystical beings rather than mutants; creatures like vampires and werewolves, Wendigos and hydras. Sinister experimented upon them all, dissecting them, learning everything he could about them. Some samples were deemed unwanted, and were cast into a sub-basement cavern - only to survive and almost escape in the present day.

Given all this, it's reasonable to assume that Nathaniel Essex is just as knowledgeable on matters of mysticism as he is on mutation. This revelation comes at a time when the X-Men comics are being increasingly linked to the supernatural.Excalibur has retconned the history of anti-magicviolence -from the Valais witch trials of the 15th century to French legends like theBeast ofGvaudan - was in part directed against mutants. Apocalypse, who has been a major character in these books, has been reinterpreted as a priest of Krakoa who is secretly fascinated by the mystical potential of Otherworld, a sorcerous realm linked to the British Isles. It's really not hard to see the pattern here; the current X-Men relaunch is seeing the mutant race closely tied to the supernatural.

Of course, the irony is that the X-Men themselves don't seem aware of this pattern.Apocalypse and Sinister are both keeping this secret from the rest of Krakoa's Quiet Council, most likely pushing their own dark agendas. The interesting question is whether they coincide - or whether, instead, it's only a matter of time before these two powerful and dangerous mutants find themselves operating at cross purposes.

Ruins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth #1 is on sale now in comic book stores.

More:X-Men Bringing Back Marvel's OTHER Wolverine?

Superman Finally Gets Fired From The Daily Planet

Tom Bacon is one of Screen Rant's staff writers, and he's frankly amused that his childhood is back - and this time it's cool. Tom's focus tends to be on the various superhero franchises, as well as Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Star Trek; he's also an avid comic book reader. Over the years, Tom has built a strong relationship with aspects of the various fan communities, and is a Moderator on some of Facebook's largest MCU and X-Men groups. Previously, he's written entertainment news and articles for Movie Pilot.A graduate of Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom, Tom is still strongly connected with his alma mater; in fact, in his spare time he's a voluntary chaplain there. He's heavily involved with his local church, and anyone who checks him out on Twitter will quickly learn that he's interested in British politics as well.

Go here to read the rest:
The X-Men's Mr. Sinister is An Expert On Sorcery Too - Screen Rant

Sea moss (a.k.a Irish moss) is not something that you'll find in the typical American diet. But if you're of Jamaican or of Irish descent, there's a chance you've at least heard of it.

I'm first-generation Jamaican, and growing up, I was only exposed to sea moss in the form of a sugary beverage. When my family went out to a local restaurant to eat curry goat or jerk chicken, I would pick it out from the fridge in it's non-branded, homemade bottle. The sweet, creamy mixture of condensed milk, moss, vanilla, and nutmeg was a real treat after some spicy delights. But as tasty as this drink was, I knew it wasn't really healthy. So as a kid, I never thought that pure Irish moss had any beneficial properties on it's own. That is until I did some reading....

Sea moss is a type of red algae that grows on the Atlantic coastlines of North America, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands. Since the 1800s, the Irish have been harvesting it from their rocky shores to use as medicine. They even used it to get the nutrients they needed during times of famine. Jamaicans have also traditionally used sea moss to treat illness, and some have touted it to be the perfect elixir to increase male libido. Unfortunately, there's no scientific proof for the latter (sorry, guys), but there's a lot of research showing that our ancestors understood the healing potential of this plant.

While it's been embraced by Irish and Jamaican cultures, sea moss has been getting a bad rap lately. Carrageenan, a derivative of this seaweed, is a thickening agent that can be found in dairy and alt-milk products. This ingredient is said to cause inflammation and was labeled as "a possible human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. That's some scary news that has certainly discouraged many people from consuming this algae.

However, it's important to note that carrageenan (a chemically processed ingredient) is different than sea moss. Sea moss is a whole food that is in fact chockfull of beneficial vitamins, nutrients, and antioxidants. So while our forefathers and foremothers have used sea moss for old-time remedies they may or may not have been able to explain, here are six ways this red seaweed can improve your health along with the science to back it up.

Like chia seeds, aloe, and okra, sea moss is a mucilaginous food. As gross as this sounds, its snotty texture makes it a great healing/soothing agent for mucus membranes in the body, including in the respiratory and digestive systems. According to some animal studies, sea moss can have a prebiotic effect during digestion. This means that it can increase beneficial short-chain fatty acids in the colon, get rid of bad bacteria in the gut, and improve overall gut health and immunity.

Irish moss is full of different iodine compounds that your thyroid needs to healthily chug along. It contains DI-Iodothyronine, which is actually used to treat thyroid disorders. And it also contains high amounts of concentrated iodine, which your thyroid uses to make hormones that regulate your metabolism, digestion, mood, and more.

When it comes to capitalizing the energy stored in food, you need B vitamins. Sea moss contains a decent amount of riboflavin (B2) and folate (B9). Riboflavin is needed to break down proteins, carbs, and fats, while folate is needed to form DNA and other genetic material. When folate pairs up with B12, it also helps to create red blood cells.

During cold and flu season, sea moss smoothies could become your go-to meal. It has potassium iodide, which is great for dissolving troublesome phlegm in clogged airways. It also rich in amino acids, vitamin C, antioxidants, as well as a host of antiviral and antimicrobial agents. These nutrients can help you to fight or ward off infections.

Because of its vitamin and mineral packed gelatin-like quality, many people use sea moss masks to soothe eczema, psoriasis, dermatitis and burns. Studies have found that citrullinearginine, a compound found in Irish moss, can improve cell growth and metabolism. This compound also releases amino acids that are essential for protein and collagen synthesis. Collagen is the protein that maintains smooth skin and silky hair.

Sea moss has a bunch of magnesium and potassium, which are known mood boosters. Both minerals play a key role in brain function, and when we are low on either, we might feel crankier than usual. Some research indicates that sea moss may protect brain tissue from degeneration and Parkinson's disease.

If you are looking to get your hands on some sea moss, you can either buy it raw or in gel form. If you buy it raw, you're going to have to prepare it by washing the moss thoroughly, soaking it for about a day, then tossing it in the blender until you get the right consistency.

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Sea moss is tasteless so you can add it to a variety of dishes. In fact, it's an especially great plant-based substitute for gelatin or other thickening agents. The traditional Jamaican Irish moss drink is a popular option, but you can also put it in:

Remember, since Irish moss has little to no flavor, you can get creative when it comes to reaping the benefits of this nutritious algae. So don't be afraid to experiment. You might come up with a new, tasty recipe.

See the article here:
Health Benefits of Sea Moss - Is Irish Moss Good for You? - GoodHousekeeping.com

Today, Cobb-Vantress appointed Dr Mark Cooper as managing director of genetics to oversee the companys global genetic program. Effective immediately, Dr Cooper will continue work to achieve genetic gains and competitive advantage through alignment of Cobbs breeding program with its product strategy, developing a portfolio of products to meet growing global market needs. He will report to Dr Aldo Rossi, vice president of research and development (R&D).

In his new role, Dr Cooper will lead a global, multifunctional team, including Dr Rachel Hawken, senior director of genetics; Dr Manouchehr Katanbaf, senior geneticist; and Dr Sriram Krishna, senior geneticist. Prior to this appointment, Dr Cooper previously worked as director of product testing. Since joining Cobb, he has also served as pedigree geneticist responsible for male line development, European director of genetics, director of genetics for all of Cobbs breeding programs, and director of product management.

Cobb has been dedicated to genetic research and the responsible use of technology for over 100 years, said Dr Rossi. Dr Cooper has made a big impact in his nearly 20 years with Cobb, and were looking forward to the continued advancements we expect him to accomplish in this new position.

In his time at Cobb, Dr Coopers research has focused on technology development and implementation in the breeding program, welfare parameters and meat quality. He has also spent time with global business leaders and customers to understand and update the R&D team on the product portfolio needed for the future. Most recently, he led Cobbs product testing team, helping to evaluate the companys product performance and development.

Im honored to take on the position of managing director of genetics, said Dr Cooper. Im fortunate because Cobb invests a significant percentage revenue into research and development, allowing us to continue leading the way in genetic progress.

Dr Cooper earned a bachelors degree in poultry science from Texas A&M University, a masters degree in poultry genetics from the University of Georgia, and a PhD in poultry genetics from the University of Arkansas.

Read more from the original source:
Cobb-Vantress appoints genetics executive - The Poultry Site

Aicardi syndrome is a very rare condition that usually affects girls.

Depending on its severity, it can cause developmental delay, epilepsy, problems with vision, and a shortened life expectancy.

In this article, learn more about Aicardi syndrome, including its risk factors, symptoms, and treatments.

Aicardi syndrome is a rare condition that almost exclusively affects females, with doctors having reported only a few cases in males.

Another name for Aicardi syndrome is agenesis of corpus callosum, or ACC.

Experts think that the condition develops in an embryo during early pregnancy, when there is a change in the DNA of one or more genes.

Aicardi syndrome is not passed down through families. It occurs in people with no family history of the condition.

Doctors usually diagnose Aicardi syndrome in early infancy after the baby experiences seizures called infantile spasms.

Children with Aicardi syndrome may also have developmental delays, learning difficulties, and partial sight or blindness. They may also have a shortened life expectancy.

Aicardi syndrome is very rare, occurring in just 1 in 105,000167,000 babies in the United States. Around the world, there are likely about 4,000 people with the condition. Most of these people are female.

Researchers believe that Aicardi syndrome results from genetic mutations that happen while an embryo is forming. One change may involve the X chromosomes in affected females.

Female embryos have two X chromosomes, while males embryos have just one.

Research indicates that when the characteristic genetic mutations occur in one X chromosome, female embryos can survive because another, healthy X chromosome is present.

If these changes occur in the single X chromosome of a male embryo, it is unlikely to survive. This could explain why babies born with the syndrome are almost exclusively female.

However, very rarely, male babies have been born with Aicardi syndrome. Some boys with the condition have an extra X chromosome.

A mutation in the TEAD1 gene on chromosome 11 may also be responsible for some cases of Aicardi syndrome in boys and girls.

Scientists have yet to prove these theories definitively, and research into the causes of Aicardi syndrome is ongoing.

Infantile spasms are usually the first symptom of Aicardi syndrome. These are seizures that involve single jerks of the whole body.

The spasms often appear before 3 months of age, and they can occur several times a day.

Before a doctor can make a diagnosis of Aicardi syndrome, they need to conduct tests to rule out other possible causes of the symptoms. These alternate causes could include:

Children with Aicardi syndrome usually have some degree of developmental delay and learning difficulties.

Epilepsy is a feature of Aicardi syndrome, and one study found that those with more severe epilepsy had poorer cognitive skills, involving organization and memory.

Some people with Aicardi syndrome have milder symptoms and may not receive a diagnosis until they are adults.

A doctor can detect Aicardi syndrome's changes to the brain with an MRI scan. Some or all of the following features could be present:

People with Aicardi syndrome often have chorioretinal lacunae, which are round, whitish-yellow lesions in the retina the tissue that lines the back of the eye. An ophthalmologist can see these lesions with an ophthalmoscope.

A person with Aicardi syndrome may also have:

Sometimes, these symptoms cause partial-sightedness or blindness.

Also, some people with Aicardi syndrome have distinct facial features and other physical attributes, including:

Other health issues associated with Aicardi syndrome are:

Aicardi syndrome can cause different symptoms in different people, and the treatments also vary.

The aim of treatment is to manage the symptoms, and a doctor will tailor their approach to address each person's situation.

Some treatments focus on easing the severity and frequency of seizures. Others, such as physical, speech, and occupational therapies, can help people with Aicardi syndrome overcome developmental delays and problems relating to vision.

Having a rare disease or being the parent or caregiver of someone with this type of illness can be difficult. A person may feel isolated.

Support groups give people a space to voice their concerns and speak with others who face similar challenges.

The following groups may be useful for people with Aicardi syndrome and their loved ones:

Aicardi syndrome is a rare condition that can cause seizures, vision problems, and other symptoms. It mainly occurs in females.

Most experts think that Aicardi syndrome results from genetic mutation in embryos during very early pregnancy. It is not passed down through families.

As there is no cure for the condition, treatment aims to manage each individual's symptoms.

Read more here:
Aicardi syndrome: Definition, causes, symptoms, and more - Medical News Today

Researchers have uncovered new genetic evidence linked to anxiety in the largest study on the condition that included about 200,000 veterans.

By comparing the participants genomes, the researchers pinpointed six genetic regions related to anxiety and their ties with other psychiatric conditions.

Dr. Joel Gelernter, a senior co-author of the study, said the research provides molecular evidence of shared genetic risk for anxiety and other psychiatric conditions such as depression, which can help identify specific genes that affect risks for such disorders.

To the extent that it identifies genes that were not previously known to be associated biologically with these traits, it will help us understand the biology, and biology can lead to treatment strategies, said Dr. Gelernter, who is a Yale University professor and psychiatrist for the VA Connecticut Healthcare Center. So the ultimate hope is that this study and/or its successor studies will begin to lead us to understand novel biology, which can then lead us to novel treatments that are relevant to anxiety traits.

The study, published last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry, pulled data from the Million Veteran Program, one of the worlds largest biodata banks that includes genetic and medical information from U.S. military veterans.

About 40 million adults in the U.S., or 18%, live with anxiety disorders the most common mental illness, according to the Anxiety and Depression Disorder of America.

However, the studys researchers estimate that anxiety disorders affect 1 in 10 Americans each year.

Dr. *Elspeth Ritchie, a retired military psychiatrist and chief of psychiatry at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, said the differences in numbers could be due to how anxiety is defined, commenting on how post-traumatic stress disorder used to be medically categorized as an anxiety disorder.

It is estimated that only about a third of those with anxiety disorders receive treatment.

Although there are not immediate treatment implications for our findings, they do point us toward future treatments that may involve some of the biochemical pathways and systems identified by our research, said Dr. Murray Stein, a co-author of the study, University of California San Diego professor and staff psychiatrist for the VA San Diego Healthcare System.

He said genome-wide association studies, such as this one, examine millions of markers across the entire genome to see if each marker is more or less common among people with anxiety.

The research team found five genetic variants related to anxiety in European Americans and one in African Americans.

While previous similar studies examined traits among individuals of mostly European descent, this study also included DNA samples from African Americans, who are not always included in large genetic studies, said Dr. Gelernter.

The study discovered the first genome-wide significant findings on anxiety in African ancestry, according to a press release by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

About 18% of the enrollees in the Military Veteran Program, which has more than 800,000 participants, are African American.

One of the variants linked to anxiety the researchers identified occurs in an estrogen receptor. Women are more likely to have anxiety and depression traits, said Dr. Gelernter, but this variant was found in a primarily male study group. He said he would like to eventually test sex differences of this genetic variant.

People with anxiety disorders often experience intense, disproportionate concerns about anticipated events that lead to distress that can interfere with daily activities.

Anxiety is very common, and its also very common for it to be either untreated and undertreated. We do have decent treatments for it, said Dr. Ritchie. I think its important [to treat] because anxiety really gets in peoples way.

She noted there hasnt been much progress so far in the development of new psychiatric treatments based on genetic studies.

Some medications and types of psychotherapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy effectively treat anxiety disorders.

Genetic studies in other fields of medicine have led to precision medicine approaches for treating various diseases. The studys researchers hope more genetic insight into anxiety will lead to the development of tailored treatments for psychiatric patients.

The research team also found that genetic variants tied to anxiety overlapped with other psychiatric conditions such as neuroticism, schizophrenia and insomnia.

(* Correction: An earlier version of the story incorrectly stated Dr. Elspeth Ritchies name. The story has been updated.)

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Researchers uncover genetic links to anxiety in veterans - Washington Times

Learning Objectives

This module will update you on the role of genetics in breast and ovarian cancer, including:

Dr Marc Tischkowitz is a reader and consultant in medical genetics at the University of Cambridge and East Anglian Medical Genetic Service

There are a few key questions that can give an idea of whether family history needs to be explored further:

These four questions should identify the need for a more detailed investigation is required. It is crucial to ask about the paternal side. All the main cancer susceptibility genes can be passed on by either sex but as men rarely get breast cancer, the history can appear more distant on the male side. The cancer pattern can be masked if there are lots of males in a family, so it is important to ask about the male/female balance. If a woman has a paternal grandmother, aunt or cousins with breast or ovarian cancer this should be taken as seriously as a positive maternal history. Ask for this information directly, as it is often not volunteered. If I were only allowed one key message in this article, it would be always to ask about paternal history.

BRCA1/BRCA2variants are 10 times more common in those of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, so it is important to ask about this where appropriate.

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CPD: Key questions on breast and ovarian cancer genetics - Pulse

AUSTIN, Texas Although they have no way of identifying their biological fathers, male chimpanzees form intimate bonds with them, a finding that questions the idea of fatherhood in some of humanitys closest relatives, according to a study of wild chimpanzees in Uganda.

In adulthood, male chimpanzees form strong relationships with one another. These bonds can be mutually beneficial to relieve stress, protect one another and share food.In a new study examining when and with whom these bonds develop, researchers found chimpanzees most often bond with their maternal brothers and old males, including seemingly unbeknownst to the younger chimps their biological fathers.

Fatherhood is really a social relationship that happens to be linked to a genetic relationship. In humans, it is strongly correlated because humans tend to form pair bonds, said Aaron Sandel, assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin. Usually we think that pair bonds evolved in humans first, and then fathers came to play an active role. However, my findings suggest that elements of fatherhood may have arisen in a chimpanzee-like social system before mates formed pair bonds.

Sandel and his team studied the social relationships of 18 adolescent and young adult (12-21 years old) male chimpanzees at Ngogo in Kibale National Park, Uganda, over the course of one year.

The researchers found that by age 12, which is about the time chimpanzees begin to regularly travel independently from their mothers, male chimpanzees form strong friendships with other males in their communities. These relationships range in intimacy, from associating in the same subgroup, where they travel, rest and feed together; to spending time in proximity, a tighter-knit group that stays within about 15 feet of one another; to grooming, where they use their fingers to comb through each others hair.

For humans, you can imagine association, proximity and grooming as if you were at a coffee shop, Sandel said. Youre in association with everyone at the coffee shop. Youre in proximity to others at the same table or one table away. And if you have a private conversation with someone, thats like grooming.

Through observation and fecal sampling, researchers found that the younger males tended to associate and spend the most time in proximity to their maternal brothers. Many bonds were with distantly related or unrelated males. Some bonds were between peers. However, many of their closest relationships were with old, retired males, including their biological father.

Its as if chimpanzees have father figures and some of these are their actual father, Sandel said. This was surprising because chimpanzee females will mate with multiple males while ovulating, and theres no paternal care in a chimps rearing. So, there is no reason to think that she or the males know who the father of her offspring is, and vice versa.

But there are benefits to bonding with an older, somewhat retired male, the researchers noted. Older males are well connected in the community but are no longer competing for a position in the hierarchy. It could be that the chimps biological father was high-ranking in the past, making him more likely to reproduce with females within the same territory and more likely to be groomed by younger chimps looking to climb the social ladder, Sandel suggested.

The researchers proposed that future research should examine the mechanisms of how father-son relationships might develop. But the fact that there is a relationship at all suggests that such bonds can arise without a bond between parents and without the father caring for his offspring as an infant, two factors thought to be important for father-offspring relationships in humans.

This research, co-authored by researchers from Arizona State University and the University of Michigan, was published in the American Journal of Primatology and reviewed and approved by the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, Uganda Wildlife Authority and the University Committee on Use and Care of Animals at the University of Michigan.

More:
Glimpses of Fatherhood in Non-Pair-Bonding Chimps - UT News | The University of Texas at Austin

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Even if they have no way of identifying them, male chimpanzees form intimate bonds with their fathers, according to a new study of wild chimpanzees in Uganda.

In adulthood, male chimpanzees form strong relationships with one another. These bonds can be mutually beneficialto relieve stress, protect one another, and share food.

In the new study, which examines when and with whom these bonds develop, researchers discovered that chimpanzees most often bond with their maternal brothers and old males, includingseemingly unbeknownst to the younger chimpstheir biological fathers.

Elements of fatherhood may have arisen in a chimpanzee-like social system before mates formed pair bonds.

Fatherhood is really a social relationship that happens to be linked to a genetic relationship. In humans, it is strongly correlated because humans tend to form pair bonds, says Aaron Sandel, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Usually we think that pair bonds evolved in humans first, and then fathers came to play an active role. However, my findings suggest that elements of fatherhood may have arisen in a chimpanzee-like social system before mates formed pair bonds.

For the study in the American Journal of Primatology, researchers studied the social relationships of 18 adolescent and young adult (12-21 years old) male chimpanzees at Ngogo in Kibale National Park, Uganda, over the course of one year.

The researchers found that by age 12, about the time chimpanzees begin to regularly travel independently from their mothers, male chimpanzees form strong friendships with other males in their communities.

These relationships range in intimacy, from associating in the same subgroup, where they travel, rest, and feed together; to spending time in proximity, a tighter-knit group that stays within about 15 feet of one another; to grooming, where they use their fingers to comb through each others hair.

For humans, you can imagine association, proximity, and grooming as if you were at a coffee shop, Sandel says. Youre in association with everyone at the coffee shop. Youre in proximity to others at the same table or one table away. And if you have a private conversation with someone, thats like grooming.

Through observation and fecal sampling, researchers found that the younger males tended to associate and spend the most time in proximity to their maternal brothers. They shared many bonds with distantly related or unrelated males. Some bonds existed between peers. However, many of their closest relationships were with old, retired males, including their biological father.

Its as if chimpanzees have father figures and some of these are their actual father, Sandel says. This was surprising because chimpanzee females will mate with multiple males while ovulating, and theres no paternal care in a chimps rearing. So, there is no reason to think that she or the males know who the father of her offspring is, and vice versa.

There are benefits to bonding with an older, somewhat retired male, the researchers say. Older males are well connected in the community but are no longer competing for a position in the hierarchy.

It could be that the chimps biological father was high-ranking in the past, making him more likely to reproduce with females within the same territory and more likely to receive grooming from younger chimps looking to climb the social ladder, Sandel suggests.

The researchers propose that future research should examine the mechanisms of how father-son relationships might develop. But the fact that there is a relationship at all suggests that such bonds arise without a bond between parents and without the father caring for his offspring as an infant, two factors thought to be important for father-offspring relationships in humans.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Michigan and Arizona State University.

Source: University of Texas at Austin

Read more:
Chimp sons like to hang with fathers and brothers - Futurity: Research News

LA SALLE On Tuesday morning, the barn at Coyote Ridge Ranch in Weld County served as the bovine equivalent of a hair salon.

Some of the ranchs top Hereford cattle were brought in for a bath and blow-dry. Outside, workers gave the rust and white-colored animals a final clipper trim, preparations for their impending closeups.

The National Western Stock Show is back for its 114th year in Denver and Coyote Ridge Ranch Herefords are right in the thick of it, as theyve been for three decades.

The Cornelius family, lead by Jane Evans and her son Hampton, founded the ranch in Boulder County, but for the past 25 years, its operated on a 1,000-acre spread south of La Salle. The barn/cattle hair salon there is 130 years old and may be the oldest structure in the Beebe Draw valley, according to the family.

Over the decades, the Corneliuses have established a reputation as one of the countrys if not the worlds preeminent producers of top quality Herefords and Hereford genetics. And the stock show is their biggest marketing opportunity of the year.

Denver is like a trade show for us. Were not there to win a ribbon. Its cool when you win one but were there to promote our genetics and make contacts, Jane said of the National Western show, where Coyote Ridge will be showing a pen of three heifers and a pen of three bulls this year.

Were showing our spring-born 2019 cattle, Hampton said. Everything is for sale. The idea is to drum up interest to get people to come back here and take a look at our other ones.

The business-first approach doesnt mean they arent proud of how Coyote Ridge Ranch has performed at National Western. Hampton rattles off the stack of honors the operation has come away with in years past. They include three grand champion pens, two bulls that won individual championships in competitions on the hill at National Western and countless individual class champions.

Its a validation of what youre doing, Jane said.

Coyote Ridge Ranch is what is known in the cattle business as a seedstock producer. The means its herd of 160 or so Herefords is being raised to further the genetics of the breed. It sells bulls, heifers, semen and embryos to commercial Hereford ranching operations that in turn produce steers for slaughter and sale to consumers.

The ranch dates back to when Hampton and his sisters Katie and Coleman, a former Denver Post staff writer, were kids raising cows and calves as part of 4-H and Future Farmers of America programs. The hobby blossomed into a passion and the family herd grew large enough to become a viable business.

The Corneliuses were drawn to Herefords because of the breeds disposition, its hardiness and the animals deep connection to ranching culture in the American West. Nowadays, Coyote Ridge is considered an elite Hereford seedstock producer with genetics from their animals spread across ranching operations in the U.S. and all over the world.

I would describe that family as just being committed to making really good cattle and breeding Herford cattle the way they need to be bred for the commercial industry, said Jack Ward, executive vice president of the American Hereford Association.

Ward and many other staffers from his association are in Denver this week for the stock show. Among the events Ward is organizing is the national Hereford junior heifer show on Wednesday morning and the Mile High Night Hereford Sale, which is expected to bring more than 1,000 people to the National Western Stadium Arena at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Ward said. Coyote Ridge will be represented at both events, of course, with Hampton Cornelius son, John, showing a heifer in the junior show.

Beyond their work furthering the Hereford breed, the Corneliuses have become ambassadors for the cattle industry in Colorado. With a ranch thats within an hours drive from downtown Denver and a willingness to open their operation to visitors, theyve hosted school groups, chefs, and delegations from countries including China, Japan and South Korea.

(Hamptons wife) Kay and Jane Evans are both so very well-spoken on so many segments of their industry, Colorado Beef Council marketing director Tami Arnold said. Just the typical consumer, we know we could take them out to their place and they would be able to really represent the beef industry well.

For Jane Evans, the most exciting visit came last summer when a Taiwanese trade delegation stopped at Coyote Ridge Ranch. It wasnt just because the visitors were so impressed by seeing a cattle operation where riders on horseback drive a herd across a pasture. She was pleased because the delegates were in Colorado to sign a letter of intent with Gov. Jared Polis to expand access in Taiwan for Colorado agricultural goods including beef.

It gets its moment in the sun in Denver every January during the National Western, but Jane is quick to point out the livestock industry is a major force in Colorados economy. Cattle operations alone generated $3.4 billion in cash receipts in the state last year, according to the University of Colorados 2020 business economic outlook.

Jane Evans, 78, has established a reputation of her own over the years. Cattle ranching has been a male-dominated industry, but she hasnt shied away from being at the center of it. In the mid-1990s, she became the first woman elected to the American Hereford Association board of directors.

She paved the way for women in the beef industry, specifically for leadership and we love her for that, said Arnold, who in addition to working with the Cornelius family through the Colorado Beef Council also ranches nearby and has known them most of her life.

Janes love for agriculture goes back to her childhood in Alabama, when her grandfather would let her tag along when he would assess farms and ranches as part of his work as a banker.

I was very lucky. In those days girls did one thing and boys did another, she said. My mother used to say, When Jane Evans grows up shes going to own a large cattle ranch in the West like Dale Evans, and I do. (Dale Evans was married to singing cowboy Roy Rogers and they had a popular TV show in the 1950s.)

The next week will be a busy one for the Cornelius family. But now that theyve settled into their pen in the National Western Centers evolving stock yards, they do expect to have a little fun.

These guys work alone a lot. When they get together they definitely will kick up their heels a little bit, she said of her family and her fellow ranchers at the stock show. You see people that you have a lot in common with, that you work with, that you swap genetics with. Even though there is stiff competition, there is an awful lot of camaraderie.

More:
National Western Stock Show: Reputation of Weld County familys Herefords spans the globe - Fort Morgan Times

Newsroom

Frog and lizard scientists add their voices to the call for climate change action to save species from extinction

By 2085 climate change could mean life is a 60-year long boys weekend for tuatara. Temperature can dictate whether tuatara eggs hatch as female or male. In a warming world maleswill briefly emerge from eggs as the lonely, functionally extinct winners.

It would be an ignominious end for a species whose roots go back to the dinosaur age.

Last week, almost a thousand attendees from around the globe descended on Dunedin for the 9th World Congress of Herpetology. Held every four years, the event is like the Olympics for those who study reptiles and amphibians.

The 600 pluspresentations included debate on the fragile state of the worlds amphibians and reptiles. Around 40 percent of amphibians are threatened with extinction. Reptile species are under similar pressure.

University of Otago Zoology Professor Phil Bishop, the congress director, said a recurring thread in presentations was the threat of climate change.

It is highly likely that we will observe many species going extinct in front of our very own eyes in the next decade.

New Zealand used to have seven frog species. Three are now extinct and the remaining four are threatened with, or at risk of, extinction.

Climate change is one of those topics where people generally throw their arms up and say theres nothing we can do but weve had enough of not doing anything. We really need to be pushing the people who can do something about it.

The congress released a declaration calling for all governments to acknowledge the accumulated evidence of global climate change and take immediate action to mitigate future impact. This includes increasing protection for biodiversity and wild places.

As a group, the congress also made a commitmentfor itsevents to become 100 percent carbon neutral in future and serve locally sourced food with limited meat and dairy.

Climate change adds pressure to the numerous issues facing amphibians and reptiles.

Bishop said the biggest issue facing amphibians worldwide wasloss of habitat.

Whether its habitat destruction, or habitat alteration by climate change, or habitat fragmentation, thats the main issue.

Frogs are cold-blooded and cant regulate their body temperature themselves, relying on theenvironment around them. There are fears the pace of warming temperatures might prove too much.

If we could just stop messing around with their habitat, a lot of amphibians would be safe.

The fires in Australia highlight another concern. With habitat burnt, any survivors of speciesare easy pickings for predators such as feral cats. Studies show they will travel some distance to hunt in sites which have been recently burnt. For those which escape the flames and predators and manage to establish a new population there's the issue of in-breeding.

Previous studies of Australian frog life after bushfire revealed genetic diversity within the population had decreased. With just a small number of adults surviving the fires, populations had become inbred meaning they were likely to bemore vulnerable to future threats.

Disease is a threat which has become a major concern.

Theyre getting a number of infectious diseases. I liken this to the thousand straws which break the camels back. With a whole number of stressors, amphibiansbeing subjected to emerging diseases, [is] the last nail in the coffin, just knocking them down so they become extinct.

One disease, chytrid fungus is well known. However, presentations at the conference highlighted another virus which may prove to be more of a danger than first thought.

Ranavirus: The new killer on the block

Skin ulcers, limbs dropping off, emaciation and haemorrhaging are all symptoms of ranavirus.

Once caught, theres no cure and the result is often fatal.

The diseaseaffects amphibians as well as reptiles and fish and has been found in the United Kingdom, United States and parts of Asia and Australia.

Research in the UK shows warming temperatures caused by climate change haveincreased the spread and severity of the virus. When the weather warms to 16C, outbreaks increase.

So far, ranavirus hasnt been found in New Zealand frogs. With an active exotic fish pet trade Bishop expects its just a matter of time before its found here.

With no cure available the hope seems to be for species to eventually develop immunity to the virus.

The suffocating fungus

One of the well known issues facing amphibians is the chytrid fungus. This affects how the creatures breathe through their skin and effectively suffocates them.

Referred to as an amphibian apocalypse the fungus is estimated to have caused the extinction of around 90 amphibian species as well as be responsible for a decline in numbers of around 500 different species.

Bishop said a strain of the fungus hit New Zealand in the mid 1990s to early 2000s. Hardest-hit were introduced species and the native Archeys frog.

Studies since then have shown our native frogs have an immunity to the strain present here. Frogs exposed to the pathogen show no signs of disease. Within 10 weeks the frogs are pathogen-free.

If we could close all our borders to make sure no other disease got into New Zealand, were safe from a chytrid fungus point of view because all our frogs seem to be able to cure themselves.

The concern is the arrival of a different strain of the fungus. The strain which is causing the most problems worldwide isnt here yet and Bishop worries every time he hears of any accidental frog or cane toad incursion.

Climate change is likely to alter where the fungus is found. Preferring cool, wet environments, its likely to move up mountains atthe same time amphibians beat an upward escape from warming temperatures.

"There seems to be a lot of emerging infectious diseases which were tolerated by amphibian populations that seem to not be tolerated anymore."

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Newsroom Climate change adds to frog woes Frog and lizard scientists add their voices to the - Newsroom

When it comes to care and services for people with neurodevelopmental disabilities like fragile X, there is a long way to go. Protics published study found that medical professionals in Serbia know very little about fragile X, a problem she hopes to remedy through medical conferences and the countrys newly launched Fragile X Society the only one for the entire Balkan region. With funding support from Sacramentos Serbian immigrant community, Protic already has set up the countrys first fragile X testing site.

The X in fragile X syndrome refers to the X chromosome, where the mutated gene that causes the disorder is located. That gene, FMR1, is involved in making a protein important for the development of critical connections between nerve cells. When the cells cant make the protein, the nervous system can malfunction, leading to the signs and symptoms of fragile X syndrome. Fragile X affects one in 2,500 to 4,000 males and one in 7,000 to 8,000 females.

What the disorder looks like in children varies, but males are more severely affected. They are more likely to have intellectual disabilities and distinguishing physical characteristics like long, narrow faces, big ears, prominent jaw and forehead, unusually flexible fingers and flat feet. Affected individuals also frequently have speech and language delays, behavior challenges, ADHD and anxiety.

An estimated 50% of children with fragile X also have autism, and its the most common single-gene cause of autism, accounting for about up to 6% of cases. And while children with fragile X and autism may share many characteristics, children with fragile X can be more interested in other people, make friends more easily and do better in social settings, Randi Hagerman said.

Ive known many boys with fragile X who have been voted Homecoming King, she told the conference audience one of many hopeful anecdotes she shared during her talk.

As theyve been doing increasingly over the past several years, MIND Institute experts brought a treasure trove of information to the people gathered in Belgrade to advance the regions understanding of fragile X and help clinicians and others begin to address the needs of the affected population.

MIND Institute Director Leonard Abbeduto, a psychologist, whose work includes using digital communication technologies to help parents support their childrens language development, said the trip to Belgrade exemplifies the evolution of the MIND Institute, founded in 1998 to find and develop treatments for neurodevelopmental disabilities. The institutes International Training Program in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, which invites health care professionals and scientists from around the world to train at the MIND Institute, has had 24 participants from China, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Singapore, Spain, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Japan, Israel, South Korea and Serbia, including Protic. Many of them have taken their knowledge home to create their own programs.

The MIND is a research, treatment and training center created out of the efforts of families who wanted to make life better for their children and other families, Abbeduto said. We are really trying to build on what weve done to enhance our impact locally, nationally and internationally, which is why I was motivated to make the trip to Belgrade.

Joining colleagues from Johns Hopkins, Rush, Emory and other universities, MIND Institute speakers elaborated on the latest in clinical diagnosis and assessments for children with fragile X, family-focused language interventions, the latest in scientific discovery and DNA testing, new targeted treatments currently in use and others on the horizon, as well as the importance in involving patients and families in advocacy efforts.

I find that we have so much knowledge at the MIND Institute, I really want to share it, said Randi Hagerman. Sometimes, in many other countries the doctors have never even heard of fragile X syndrome.

Maija and Cristian Sukreski traveled from Croatia to the meeting in Belgrade in search of advice to help their 3-year-old son, Petar, diagnosed a year ago with fragile X. The tiny, blond Petar is rambunctious, nonverbal and increasingly aggressive, hitting his parents when they attempt to calm him. Its a trait his mother worries could become dangerous as she tearfully ponders the future.

Their trip, Maija Sukreski said, was to find help.

He is going to therapy now, and I hope he can receive other therapy that will be more effective to slow down the behavior problems and help him talk, she said.

In a small and drab clinic exam room, the couple awaited a chat with David Hessl, a MIND Institute psychologist and researcher known internationally for his work to refine psychological assessments for children with fragile X syndrome and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Petar stood, biting his hands then flapping them, a common autism characteristic referred to as stimming short for self-stimulating. They told Hessl about the boys worrisome behaviors.

The aggression is a form of communication, Hessl told the parents. Hes not angry with you. Hes just overwhelmed.

Hessl suggested that instead of punishing Petar for hitting, they should reinforce good behavior with rewards of things he wants, like bananas, or special toys.

When he hits, dont be emotional or reactive. Stay really neutral. Turn away, he said, adding: Put a lot of time in this now and you will save yourself a lot of problems later. When his speech comes, he will probably be less aggressive.

In another exam room, Hagerman and Protic were talking to the Cvijetics while Demetrije chewed his knuckles, played with his fathers iPhone and made frequent whimpering sounds.

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Spreading Health Solutions and Hope - UC Davis

The first stranded orca whale in England and Wales for nearly two decades has been discovered.

The 15ft-long juvenile male died after becoming stranded in the salt marshes of The Wash, the bay and estuary where Norfolk and Lincolnshire meet.

Experts are investigating the incident - the first confirmed stranding the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme has had in England and Wales since 2001.

Orcas are a priority species for research by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), which is a partner of the programme, as they are top predators that can absorb significant concentrations of marine pollutants such as chemicals known as PCBs which accumulate as they go up the food chain.

Blubber, liver, muscle and kidney samples were collected from the whale by ZSL's Rob Deauville and Matt Perkins.

Most of the marine mammal's internal organs were intact despite having died a week ago, meaning its skin has started decomposing.

The investigators will analyse samples for marine contaminants and use genetic analysis to determine which population the whale came from.

Its teeth have also been collected to accurately assess his age.

Experts said there was no evidence of recent feeding as its stomachs were largely empty.

The team found a large fragment of plastic in the first stomach but it had not killed the orca as the stomach was not blocked.

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First stranded orca in nearly 20 years discovered on England's east coast - Sky News

Ken Baker, Columnist Published 12:27 p.m. ET Jan. 14, 2020

Ken Baker and Cocoa(Photo: Submitted)

According to the Chinese Calendar, the 13 months from Jan.25, 2020, through Feb.21, 2021 will be the Year of the Ratthe Gold Rat.

Each of the 12 Chinese Zodiac signs (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig) is associated with one of five elements: water, wood, fire, earth or metal (gold). So all told, it takes 60 years (12 x 5) to cycle through all possible combinations.

A person born under the sign of the Rat is purported to be quick-witted and resourceful, with a rich imagination though, perhaps, a bit shy in courage. Since Chinese culture attributes diligence and thriftiness to the rat, its expected those born in a Rat year will do pretty well for themselves.

Or so its said.

Setting aside such cultural personifications along with any aversion we might harbor towards the animal, what have we learned about the rats biology and the way it actually lives its life?

In our area and indeed throughout North America and Europe, the species youd be most likely to encounter today is the brown or Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus). But thats only been the case over the last several centuries.

The black rat (Rattus rattus), also known as the roof or ship rat, is thought to have invaded Europe from Southeast Asia sometime between the 4th and 2nd century BC and North America in the 16th century. The somewhat larger and more aggressive Norway rat appears to have reached Europe as stowaways on trading ships from Northern China during the 1500s and North American shores some 200 years later.

In cooler northern climates, the Norway has largely replaced the once abundant black rat, which is still the more common species in tropical areas.

The Chinese Zodiac calendar celebrates 2020 as the Year of the Rat, which gives recognition to this Norway rat.(Photo: Submitted)

It should be noted that there are many other species of larger-than-a-mouse rodents commonly referred to as rats. The genus Rattus alone has over 50 such species and there are interesting beasts called rats in several unrelated genera (Neotoma, Dipodomys and Bandicota, for example).

But the black and Norway are the two species that have played the largest role in human history. In fact to ask about the natural habitat of either mammal poses an interesting challenge. Both have been so closely associated with human habitations for so long that the best description of their normal habitat in nature might simply be wherever people live.

Which is not to say their biology is any less complex and interesting. Female Norway rats, for example, commonly live in colonies of six or so related individuals. Each female will have her own nest chamber within a shared (often underground) burrow. Intriguingly, members of the group will often nurse their young collectively.

While daughters commonly remain with the colony, males disperse soon after being weaned. If the population of rats in the area is relatively low, one adult male will typically dominate the colony, vigorously defending it against other males and mating with its females.

In dense populations, however, there will be too many intruders for him to maintain exclusive control of the colony and he will have to suffer the presence of other males seeking to mate with females when they come into breeding condition (about once every 4 -5 days if not impregnated).

In the wild (that is excluding rats kept as pets or in a scientific laboratory), the average lifespan of a Norway rat is probably less than one year. Studies of several European populations found about 95 percentannual mortality, with just a (very) few venerable old-timers making it to three years.

The rats perception of the world (its mvelt in the language of behavioral biologists) is very different from our own. Their eyesight is quite weak beyond a foot away, they can only detect large shapes and movement and, like most other mammals, they cannot detect the color red.

But this doesnt make them less effective in navigating their environment. Norway rats, which are primarily active at night, live in a world of textures, sounds and smells. When moving about, the Norways long whiskers whisk back and forth several dozen times per second, lightly touching all nearby objects.

They can hear (and communicate with) sounds much higher in pitch than we can detect, and its been estimated that over 1 percentof their genetic material is devoted to the detection of odors.

Finally a word on the connection between rats and the Bubonic Plague that swept through the Eastern Hemisphere in the mid-1300s, killing 25 to 60 percentof the human population of Europe. The so-called Black Death, caused by the bite of a flea carrying the Yersinia pestis bacterium, has long been blamed on the spread of flea-infested black rats.

However more recent studies have strongly suggested Yersinias initial invasion of Europe might be better pinned on gerbils, of all things, which unlike rats can carry the bacteria in their blood for some time without killing them.

Oh, and regardless of its name, the Norway rat has no special association with Scandinavia.

Ken Baker is a retired professor of biology and environmental studies. If you have a natural history topic you would like Dr. Baker to consider for an upcoming column, please email your idea to fre-newsdesk@gannett.com.

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Ken Baker: 2020 is the Year of the Rat, but what do we know about the rodents? - The News-Messenger

An announcement from our friends at White River Growpro.

White River Growpro, a specialty gardening store located in downtown White River Junction, is currently running a cannabis pheno hunt and is giving away free cannabis seeds to anyone who would like to participate in the contest.

This is not a traditional cannabis cup in which the biggest and best buds win, its a challenge looking for a particular phenotype amongst many.

This contest, which was announced last spring and has been extended through July 1st, 2020, has already given out over 2500 free seeds and still has several thousand seeds available for those whod like to play. They are specifically searching for an old cannabis strain: East Coast Sour Diesel.

We have always felt that the original cut of East Coast Sour Diesel (ECSD) is one of the finest cannabis cultivars.

Here at Growpro, explains Growpro co-owner and cannabis breeder Kendall Smith, we have always felt that the original cut of East Coast Sour Diesel (ECSD) is one of the finest cannabis cultivars. With wide ranging appeal, this uplifting variety has smells of sour lemon skunk and earth. The problem is that the original is clone only and its become finicky to grow. Were trying to change that.

Ive been working on a breeding project with a 30-year-old cut of ECSD that is currently in the F2 stage, says Smith, meaning there will be a wide genetic expression throughout the seeds. Somewhere in these seeds will be a pheno that is as close to the original East Coast Sour Diesel as we can expect to find.

This crowd sourced breeding project is a creative way to take advantage of current law and share cannabis genetics with the Vermont community. Co-owner Stephanie Waterman says this project was inspired by a culture of sharing genetics amongst friends.

Vermont law only allows for 2 plants in flower, which means pheno hunting can take years and years.

Under current Vermont law, says Waterman, there is not a great way to obtain seeds other than through gifting, and we are limited by our plant counts. Vermont law only allows for 2 plants in flower, which means pheno hunting can take years and years. Thats why were enlisting an army of growers to help us find the pheno, injecting thousands of free seeds into the Vermont growing community, and giving out thousands of dollars in prizes to the winners! Its all in good fun.

Anyone whod like to participate can stop into White River Growpro and request a packet. Each pack contains 13 regular cannabis seeds, meaning they will produce both males and females.

Growers have until 7/1/2020 to submit a quarter ounce of finished flower for the judges.

If your flower is selected as a finalist, you will be asked to submit a clone of that plant that the judges will grow out to confirm the genetic is on point. The winner will be announced in December of 2020.

This contest is about having fun and sharing cannabis genetics with the greater Vermont community.

Anyone who completes the contest and submits finished flower will be able to get a cutting of the winning phenotype. In the end, says Waterman, this contest is about having fun and sharing cannabis genetics with the greater Vermont community. Weve seen some amazing phenotypes coming out of this contest and I love seeing the great work the growers are doing adds Kendall.

For more information about the contest, prizes, and the breeding project, please visit the White River Growpro website and click on Events & Classes.

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White River Growpro's "Hunt for the Pheno Contest" Gives Away Free Cannabis Seeds | Cannabis Events, Culture and News - Heady Vermont

Taylor Tran (left) and her mother Mai Nguyen. Taylor underwent cancer treatment when she was 2 years old, causing her to go into early menopause when she was just 16.

You pay the price for having cancer over and over again.

Mai Nguyens words are loaded with sorrow as she speaks about her 17-year-old daughter, Taylor Tran, who is dealing with fertility concerns more than a decade after she survived late-stage cancer.

Its easy to understand the exasperation Nguyen feels: Her daughter was diagnosed with stage 3 single-cell sarcoma of the kidney when she was 2 years old and was treated with intense chemotherapy and radiation. Now, the treatments that saved her life have put her into early menopause.

Its been traumatic, Nguyen said. Weve tried so hard to allow Taylor to have a normal childhood and this feels like one more thing cancer has taken from her.

Stories like Taylors inspired Seattle Childrens urologist Dr. Margarett Shnorhavorian to tackle a challenging area of research that was largely uncharted more than a decade ago. Since then, shes helped change perspectives and protocols for fertility preservation in childhood cancer survivors.

Stories like Taylors inspired Seattle Childrens urologist Dr. Margarett Shnorhavorian to tackle a challenging area of research that was largely uncharted when she started more than a decade ago.

Shnorhavorians passion stems from the encounters shes had with the families of childhood cancer patients since starting her practice 12 years ago. She often spoke with families whod just received a devastating diagnosis about the importance of fertility preservation.

One thought was that families wouldnt want to think about fertility when they were trying to deal with the chaos of cancer, Shnorhavorian said. But when I brought it up, I saw the tone in the room lift. They were grateful we were talking about their life after cancer, because it meant we believed they would have one. It was like glimpsing at the end of a rainbow.

At the time, there was little information providers could offer about how patients fertility might be affected by various cancer treatments. Families couldnt find the answers they desperately wanted.

Initially, I thought if we brought up sperm banking and an adolescent didnt want to talk about it, we should just end the conversation there, Shnorhavorian said.

That was until a study led by Shnorhavorian changed her mind. The study surveyed over 400 adolescent and young adult cancer patients finding that a significant portion had never discussed their fertility preservation options with their care team before starting treatment.

I learned not to take no for an answer when a young patient didnt want to think about it. We have an obligation to explore the subject and remind them that, even if they are not thinking about their future fertility, we are thinking about it for them, she said.

As Shnorhavorian set out to establish her research program, she was keenly aware of the hurdles shed need to overcome to study fertility in a pediatric population.

First, recruiting enough participants to study the effects of cancer treatment on fertility would be difficult. Childhood cancer is relatively rare, so there were fewer eligible patients to draw from.

Also, many providers were uncomfortable discussing fertility issues with patients and their families who were, understandably, focused on survival. If adolescent and young adult participants did enroll, it would be difficult keep track of them because they change addresses frequently.

Shnorhavorian also had to make study participants comfortable contributing specimens such as sperm samples.

The adolescent and young adult population is unique, so we developed research methods tailored to their needs, she said.

They created a data collection system where patients could participate wherever they were located. They could have blood drawn in their dorm room or collect their sperm sample at home and send it in the mail, rather than going to a clinic.

That was a game-changer in our field, Shnorhavorian said.

Today, thanks to her innovative research methods, Shnorhavorian is leading a multi-site study to investigate the effects of chemotherapy on boys and men who have survived osteosarcoma, a common type of bone cancer.

When I started, there was limited research on male fertility, mainly because everyone had been lulled into a false sense of security thinking boys can sperm bank. But that is not an option for pre-pubertal males, she said.

According to Shnorhavorian, there are still no options for young boys to preserve their fertility.

I chose osteosarcoma because it was a population of men who would not have fertility impairments due to other therapies, like radiation, or their diagnosis. We hope the lessons we learn studying this disease can be applied to other cancers.

Patients are being recruited for the study from 178 Childrens Oncology Group institutions in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

Shnorhavorian and her teammates in Seattle Childrens Center for Clinical and Translational Research are hoping to identify biomarkers of fertility risks and genetic susceptibility to fertility impairments and better understand of sperm development and how cancer therapies modify sperm DNA.

By studying these predicting factors, Shnorhavorian hopes to shed light on why some cancer survivors become infertile after treatment, eventually, leading to preventative interventions.

When Taylor learned she was going into early menopause, she decided to freeze her eggs. My cancer treatment gave me a second chance at life, but that doesnt mean I shouldnt get to have the same experiences others have.

When Taylor learned she was going into early menopause in February 2019, she decided to freeze her eggs. She feels grateful for the opportunity even though several aspects of the fertility treatment were difficult and she often felt isolated.

My cancer treatment gave me a second chance at life, but that doesnt mean I shouldnt get to have the same experiences others have, Taylor said.

Shnorhavorian hopes her research will continue to grow so providers can, one day, offer cancer patients new opportunities to preserve their fertility before treatment or treat their cancer without harming their reproductive health.

It is our obligation to give our patients hope, Shnorhavorian said. We have a long way to go to offer fertility preservation to every child, boy or girl, but from my standpoint, its no longer a question of Should we do this? but rather How do we do it?

Nguyen finds the idea exciting.

I want to see other kids, like Taylor, have the opportunity to raise their own genetic children, she said. It would be amazing if researchers can find a way to cure them without taking away that experience.

To learn more about the clinical trial Dr. Shnorhavorian is leading for osteosarcoma survivors, please visit the study page on our website. For more information on clinical trials at Seattle Childrens, please visit our current research studies page.

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Fighting to Give Every Child With Cancer a Chance to Become a Parent - On the Pulse

LA SALLE On Tuesday morning, the barn at Coyote Ridge Ranch in Weld County served as the bovine equivalent of a hair salon.

Some of the ranchs top Hereford cattle were brought in for a bath and blow-dry. Outside, workers gave the rust and white-colored animals a final clipper trim, preparations for their impending closeups.

The National Western Stock Show is back for its 114th year in Denver and Coyote Ridge Ranch Herefords are right in the thick of it, as theyve been for three decades.

The Cornelius family, lead by Jane Evans and her son Hampton, founded the ranch in Boulder County, but for the past 25 years, its operated on a 1,000-acre spread south of La Salle. The barn/cattle hair salon there is 130 years old and may be the oldest structure in the Beebe Draw valley, according to the family.

Over the decades, the Corneliuses have established a reputation as one of the countrys if not the worlds preeminent producers of top quality Herefords and Hereford genetics. And the stock show is their biggest marketing opportunity of the year.

Denver is like a trade show for us. Were not there to win a ribbon. Its cool when you win one but were there to promote our genetics and make contacts, Jane said of the National Western show, where Coyote Ridge will be showing a pen of three heifers and a pen of three bulls this year.

Were showing our spring-born 2019 cattle, Hampton said. Everything is for sale. The idea is to drum up interest to get people to come back here and take a look at our other ones.

The business-first approach doesnt mean they arent proud of how Coyote Ridge Ranch has performed at National Western. Hampton rattles off the stack of honors the operation has come away with in years past. They include three grand champion pens, two bulls that won individual championships in competitions on the hill at National Western and countless individual class champions.

Its a validation of what youre doing, Jane said.

Coyote Ridge Ranch is what is known in the cattle business as a seedstock producer. The means its herd of 160 or so Herefords is being raised to further the genetics of the breed. It sells bulls, heifers, semen and embryos to commercial Hereford ranching operations that in turn produce steers for slaughter and sale to consumers.

The ranch dates back to when Hampton and his sisters Katie and Coleman, a former Denver Post staff writer, were kids raising cows and calves as part of 4-H and Future Farmers of America programs. The hobby blossomed into a passion and the family herd grew large enough to become a viable business.

The Corneliuses were drawn to Herefords because of the breeds disposition, its hardiness and the animals deep connection to ranching culture in the American West. Nowadays, Coyote Ridge is considered an elite Hereford seedstock producer with genetics from their animals spread across ranching operations in the U.S. and all over the world.

I would describe that family as just being committed to making really good cattle and breeding Herford cattle the way they need to be bred for the commercial industry, said Jack Ward, executive vice president of the American Hereford Association.

Ward and many other staffers from his association are in Denver this week for the stock show. Among the events Ward is organizing is the national Hereford junior heifer show on Wednesday morning and the Mile High Night Hereford Sale, which is expected to bring more than 1,000 people to the National Western Stadium Arena at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Ward said. Coyote Ridge will be represented at both events, of course, with Hampton Cornelius son, John, showing a heifer in the junior show.

Beyond their work furthering the Hereford breed, the Corneliuses have become ambassadors for the cattle industry in Colorado. With a ranch thats within an hours drive of the downtown Denver and a willingness to open their operation to visitors, theyve hosted school groups, chefs, and delegations from countries including China, Japan and South Korea.

(Hamptons wife) Kay and Jane Evans are both so very well-spoken on so many segments of their industry, Colorado Beef Council marketing director Tami Arnold said. Just the typical consumer, we know we could take them out to their place and they would be able to really represent the beef industry well.

For Jane Evans, the most exciting visit came last summer when a Taiwanese trade delegation stopped at Coyote Ridge Ranch. It wasnt just because the visitors were so impressed by seeing a cattle operation where riders on horseback drive a herd across a pasture. She was pleased because the delegates were in Colorado to sign a letter of intent with Gov. Jared Polis to expand access in Taiwan for Colorado agricultural goods including beef.

It gets its moment in the sun in Denver every January during the National Western, but Jane is quick to point out the livestock industry is a major force in Colorados economy. Cattle operations alone generated $3.4 billion in cash receipts in the state last year, according to the University of Colorados 2020 business economic outlook.

Jane Evans, 78, has established a reputation of her own over the years. Cattle ranching has been a male-dominated industry, but she hasnt shied away from being at the center of it. In the mid-1990s, she became the first woman elected to the American Hereford Association board of directors.

She paved the way for women in the beef industry, specifically for leadership and we love her for that, said Arnold, who in addition to working with the Cornelius family through the Colorado Beef Council also ranches nearby and has known them most of her life.

Janes love for agriculture goes back to her childhood in Alabama, when her grandfather would let her tag along when he would assess farms and ranches as part of his work as a banker.

I was very lucky. In those days girls did one thing and boys did another, she said. My mother used to say, When Jane Evans grows up shes going to own a large cattle ranch in the West like Dale Evans, and I do. (Dale Evans was married to singing cowboy Roy Rogers and they had a popular TV show in the 1950s.)

The next week will be a busy one for the Cornelius family. But now that theyve settled into their pen in the National Western Centers evolving stock yards, they do expect to have a little fun.

These guys work alone a lot. When they get together they definitely will kick up their heels a little bit, she said of her family and her fellow ranchers at the stock show. You see people that you have a lot in common with, that you work with, that you swap genetics with. Even though there is stiff competition, there is an awful lot of camaraderie.

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National Western Stock Show: Reputation of Weld County familys Herefords spans the globe - The Denver Post

(Photo : moviehole.net)Hybrid sharks were found in Australia and they were able to swim in cold or tropical waters. This is a fact, not fiction ane researchers are now convinced that it will impact the local environment. All bets are on if there will be more found too.

Sharks are the perfect alpha predator according to nature's design, it is also the most adapted for the aquatic environments. Next question is whether they can evolve any further than they have. Like fiction turning into reality, that might soon be the scenario in the open ocean. It seems evolution, natural selection has found a way to improve an already fearsome alpha predator.

Is this disturbing or just another movie theme, for shark-buffs? No, it has gotten real and not a hoax at all. As stated, evolution and natural selection chooses the survival of the fittest. Several Australian shark scientists did find hybrid sharks, because two different species interbred and produce offspring. It was found out by accident when a survey was underway in Aussie waters.

The sharks catalogued had genetic traits that were not bound to a specific kind of species. So, the best guess it that they have mated and produced young with hybrid traits. After more sifting through the genetic data, the analysis revealed a mix of common blacktip shark and Australian blacktip shark. They must have mated in the wild, since mating is automatic when in spawning season.

Scary as it sounds, these sharks are not producing genetically infertile offspring, but normal individuals capable of reproduction. One thing to consider is they are close sister species, still distinct between each other. Researcher conclude because of the relative closeness of these shark species made the change to a mixed breed possible too.

Another tidbit might be somewhat on the negative side, climate change caused by human activitieshave influenced natural selection very unnaturally. Places where the sharks breed are changing, indirectly and this is why hybrids of mixed species are born. If the environment is steady and no changes, then both species will not stray into each other.

Though they are cartilaginous fish, reproduction is via male and female of the same kind. One big revelation is that sharks will not reproduce with other sharks because of differences in attraction the other sex. Discovery of hybrid sharks have forced shark specialists to rethink their assumptions, in regard to this. Abnormal mating behavior and breeding hybrids is just the tip of the iceberg for researchers, studying sharks.

Will these hybrids be better than their predecessors, or be eliminated by natural selectionas nature deems fit. If these hybrids do find individuals of the same hybrid kind, it will be the birthing of whole new shark species. Most animals alive today and those extinct were part of the process of natural selection, or survival of the fittest.

For sharks that have remained the same for millions of years, introduction of a new hybrid is important. The common blacktip shark and Australian blacktip sharkwill have specific gene set which is evolved to keep the species ready for better adaptations. The hybrid can adjust to different temperatures so they can enter other zones in the ocean. Unlike their parent species, who are located in different waters. This is what makes sharks such adaptable species and ancient species.

Yes, hybrid sharks might be common with the shift in the conditions of the eco-system. all because mankind is responsible for all climatic changes happening now. Will a Great White, Bull Shark, or Tiger Shark hybridcome about? It might and the common blacktip shark, and Australian blacktip shark is proof of that. An ocean with these fish will not be so exciting to go into either.

Related Article: Hybrid Sharks Ready to Take Over the Oceans: Fact and/or Fiction

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Fact or Fiction: Hybrid Sharks To Dominate the World's Oceans Very Soon - Science Times

People from across the South East are joining calls from the NHS urging more men to donate blood.

There's a worry not enough male donors are coming forward which could create problems because their cells can be more effective in helping sick people.

Danielle Jinadu knows how important blood donations are.

The 23-year-old law student has the life-threatening genetic disorder sickle cell disease, and needs eight units of blood every six weeks.

Like all patients who receive multiple transfusions, Danielle relies on a safe and secure supply of blood, and male donors help ensure blood is always there.

Danielle, who is studying law at the University of Warwick, said:"For me, blood transfusions are literally the difference between life and death. Without blood transfusions I know I would not be here alive at 23 years old.

"The people that give blood are often the hidden heroes. I will never get to know their names but they are extraordinary."

The NHS is worried though because there's an imbalance in donations.

Last year, only 40% of new blood donors in our region were men.Until the end of November, almost 12,500 women started donating blood in the South East - compared to just over 8,500 men.

Ellie Hudson knows how important male donors are.

Her son Finley needed three specialist blood transfusion when he was born...

He is one of around 120 people in the UK with the condition Diamond-Blackfan anemia which means he cannot produce red blood cells.

The two-year old now has monthly transfusions at Maidstone hospital.

Ellie said: He would go in once a year or so but since Finley was born he goes as regularly as he can. We are so thankful to everyone who donates, they really are lifesavers.

The NHS wants 48% of its donations this year in the South East to be from men.

Mike Stredder, the head of donor recruitment for NHS Blood and Transplant, said:

"All our donors are amazing. But we need more men to start donating blood in the South East during the New Year. Men's blood can be used in extraordinary, lifesaving ways, but we don't have enough new male donors coming forward. This is not about recruiting as many donors as possible - it's about getting the right gender mix.

"If you can't find an appointment right away don't worry - your blood will do extraordinary things if you donate in a few weeks instead."

You can find more information about becoming a blood donor here.

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Urgent need for male blood donors in the South East - ITV News

Jesse Bloom, left, and Lea Starita are genetic scientists pursuing advances with the technique known as Deep Mutational Scanning, which will be the subject of a symposium and workshop at the University of Washington in Seattle on Jan. 13 and 14. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

It has been nearly two decades since scientists accomplished the first complete sequencing of the human genome. This historic moment gave us an unprecedented view of human DNA, the genetic code that determines everything from our eye color to our chance of disease, unlocking some of the biggest mysteries of human life.

Twenty years later, despite the prevalence of genetic sequencing, considerable work remains to fulfill the promise of these advances to alleviate and cure human illness and disease.

Scientists and researchers are actually extremely good at reading genomes, but were very, very bad at understanding what were reading, said Lea Starita, co-director of Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicines Advanced Technology Lab, and research assistant professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.

But that is changing thanks to new tools and approaches, including one called Deep Mutational Scanning. This powerful technique for determining genetic variants is generating widespread interest in the field of genetics and personalized medicine, and its the subject of a symposium and workshop on Jan. 13 and 14 at the University of Washington.

I think approaches like Deep Mutational Scanning will eventually allow us to make better countermeasures, both vaccines and drugs that will help us combat even these viruses that are changing very rapidly said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary and computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington Department of Genome Sciences.

Bloom, who researches the evolution of viruses, will deliver the keynote at the symposium, held by the Brotman Baty Institute and the Center for the Multiplex Assessment of Phenotype.

On this episode of the GeekWire Health Tech Podcast, we get a preview and a deeper understanding of Deep Mutational Scanning from Bloom and Starita.

Listen to the episode above, or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and continue reading for an edited transcript.

Todd Bishop: Lets start with the landscape for precision medicine and personalized medicine. Can you give us a laypersons understanding of how personalized medicine differs from the medicine that most of us have encountered in our lives?

Lea Starita: One of the goals of precision medicine is to use the genomic sequence, the DNA sequence of the human in front of the doctor, to inform the best course of action that would be tailored to that person given their set of genes and the mutations within them.

TB: Some people in general might respond to certain treatments in certain ways and others might not. Today we dont know necessarily why thats the case, but personalized medicine is a quest to tailor the treatment or

Starita: To the individual. Exactly. Thats kind of personalized medicine, but you could also extend that to infectious disease to make sure that youre actually treating the pathogen that the person has, not the general pathogen, if you would. How would you say that, Jesse?

Jesse Bloom: I would elaborate on what Lea said when it comes to infectious diseases and other diseases. Not everybody gets equally sick when they are afflicted with the same underlying thing, and people tend to respond very differently to treatments. That obviously goes for genetic diseases caused by changes in our own genes like cancer, and it also happens with infectious diseases. For instance, the flu virus. Different people will get flu in the same year and some of them will get sicker than others, and thats personalized variation. Obviously wed like to be able to understand what the basis of that variation is and why some people get more sick in some years than others.

TB: Where are we today as a society, as a world, in the evolution of personalized medicine?

Starita: Pretty close to the starting line still. Theres been revolutions in DNA sequencing, for example. Weve got a thousand dollar genome, right? So were actually extremely good at reading genomes, but were very, very bad at understanding what were reading. So you could imagine youve got a human genome, its three billion base pairs times two, because youve got two copies of your genome, one from your mother, one from your father, and within that theres going to be millions of changes, little spelling mistakes all over the genome. We are right now very, very, very I cant even use enough verys bad at predicting which ones of those spelling mistakes are going to either be associated with disease or predictive of disease, even for genes where we know a lot about it. Even if that spelling mistake is in a spot in the genome we know a lot about, say breast cancer genes or something like that, we are still extraordinarily bad at understanding or predicting what effects those changes might have on health.

Bloom: In our research, were obviously also interested in how the genetics of a person influences how sick they get with an infectious disease, but we especially focus on the fact that the viruses themselves are changing a lot, as well. So theres changes in the virus as well as the fact that were all genetically different and those will interact with each other. In both cases, it really comes back to what Lea is saying is that I think weve reached the point in a lot of these fields where we can now determine the sequences of a humans genome or we can determine the sequence of a virus genome relatively easily. But its still very hard to understand what those changes mean. And so, thats really the goal of what were trying to do.

TB: What is deep mutational scanning in this context?

Lea Starita: A mutation is a change in the DNA sequence. DNA is just As, Cs, Ts and Gs. Some mutations which are called variants are harmless. You can think of a spelling mistake or a difference in spelling that wouldnt change the word, right? So the American gray, which is G-R-A-Y versus the British grey, G-R-E-Y. If you saw that in a sentence, its gray. Its the color.

But then it could be a spelling mistake that completely blows up the function of a protein, and then in that case, somebody could have a terrible genetic disease or could have an extremely high risk of cancer, or a flu virus could now be resistant to a drug or something like that, or resistant to your immune response. Or, mutations could also be beneficial, right? This is what allows evolution. This is how flu viruses of all the bacteria evolve to become drug resistant or gain some new enzymatic function that it needs to survive.

Bloom: For instance, in the case of mutations in the human genome, we know that everybody has mutations relative to the average human. Some of those mutations will have really major effects, some of them wont. The very traditional way or the way that people have first tried to understand what those mutations do is to sequence the genomes of a group of people and then compare them. Maybe here are people who got cancer and here are people who didnt get cancer and now you look to see which mutations are in the group that got cancer versus the group that didnt, and youll try to hypothesize that the mutations that are enriched in the group that did get cancer are associated with causing cancer.

This is a really powerful approach, but it comes with a shortcoming which is that theres a lot of mutations, and it gets very expensive to look across very, very large groups of people. And so the idea of a technique like deep mutational scanning is that we could simply do an experiment where we test all of the mutations on their own and we wouldnt have to do these sort of complicated population level comparisons to get at the answer. Because when youre comparing two people in the population, they tend to be different in a lot of ways, and its not a very well-controlled comparison. Whereas you can set up something in the lab where you have a gene that does have this mutation and does not have this mutation, and you can really directly see what the effect of that mutation is. Really, people have been doing that sort of experiment for many decades now. Whats new about deep mutational scanning is the idea that you can do that experiment on a lot of mutations all at once.

Starita: And its called deep because we try to make every possible spelling mistake. So every possible change in the amino acid sequence or the nucleotide sequence, which is the A, C, Ts and Gs, across the entire gene or the sequence were looking at.

Bloom: Lets say we were to compare me and Lea to figure out why one of us had some disease and other ones didnt. We could compare our genomes and theres going to be a lot of differences between them, and were not really going to know what difference is responsible. We dont even really know if it would be a change in their genomes thats responsible. It could be a change in something about our environment. So the idea behind deep mutational scanning is we would just take one gene. So in the case of Lea, she studies a particular gene thats related to breast cancer, and we would just make all of the individual changes in that gene and test what they do one by one. And then subsequently if we were to see that a mutation has some effect, if we were to then observe that mutation when we sequenced someones genome, we would have some idea of what it does.

Starita: The deep mutational scanning, the deep part is making all possible changes. We have all of that information at hand in an Excel file somewhere in the lab that says that this mutation is likely to cause damage to the function of the protein or the activity of the protein that it encodes. Making all of the possible mutations. Thats where the deep comes from.

TB: How exactly are you doing this? Is it because of advances in computer processing or is it because of a change in approach that has enabled this increase in volume of the different mutations you can look at?

Bloom: I would say that theres a number of technologies that have improved, but the really key one is the idea that the whole experiment can be done all at once. The traditional, if you were to go back a few decades way of doing an experiment like this, would be take one tube and put, lets say the normal or un-mutated gene variant in that, and then have another tube which has the mutant that you care about, and have somehow do an experiment on each of those two tubes and that works well.

But you can imagine if you had 10,000 tubes, it might start to become a little bit more difficult. And so the idea is that really the same way that people have gotten very good at sequencing all of these genomes, you can also use to make all of these measurements at once. The idea is you would now put all of different mutants together in the same tube and you would somehow set up the experiment, and this is really the crucial part of the whole thing, set up the experiment such that the cell or the virus or whatever youre looking at, how well it can grow in that tube depends on the effect of that mutation. And then you can just use the sequencing to read out how the frequencies of all of these mutations have changed. You would see that a good mutation that lets say helped the cell grow better would be more representative in the tube at the end, and a bad mutation would be less representative in the tube. And by doing this you could in principle group together tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands or millions of mutations all at once and read it all out in one experiment.

Starita: This has been enabled by that same revolution that has given us the thousand dollar genome. These DNA sequencers that were now using, not really to sequence human genomes, but were using them as very expensive counting machines. So, were identifying the mutation and were counting it. Thats basically what were using the sequencers for. Instead of sequencing human genomes, were using them as a tool to count all of these different pieces of DNA that are in these cells.

TB: At what stage of development is deep mutational scanning?

Starita: It started about 10 years ago. The first couple of papers came out in 2009 and 2010 actually from the Genome Sciences department at University of Washington. Those started with short sequences and very simplified experiments, and we have been working over the years to build mutational scanning into better and more accurate model systems, but that are increasing the complexity of these experiments. And so weve gone from almost, Hey, thats a cute experiment you guys did, to doing impactful work that people are using in clinical genetics and things like that.

TB: When youre at a holiday party and somebody asks you what you do and then they get really into it and they ask you, Wait, what are the implications of not only personalized medicine but this deep mutational scanning? Whats this going to mean for my life?

Starita: Right now it hasnt been systematically used in the clinic, but well get phone calls from UW pathology that says, Hey, I have a patient that has this variant. We found the sequence variant and this patient has this phenotype. What does this mutation look like in your assay? And were like, Well, it looks like its damaging. And then they put all of that information together and they can actually go back to that patient and say, You are at high risk of cancer. Were going to take medical action. That has happened multiple times. Were working right now to try to figure out how to use the information that we are creating. So these maps of the effect of mutations on these very important proteins and how to systematically use them as evidence for or against their pathogenicity. Right now for a decent percentage of these people who are telling them, Well, youve got changes but we dont know what they do. We want those tests to be more informative. So you go, you get the test, they say, That is a bad one. That ones fine. That mutation is good. That ones OK. That one, though. That ones going to cause you problems. We want more people to have more informative genetic testing because right now in a decent proportion of tests come back with an I have no idea, answer.

Bloom: You can also think about mutations that affect resistance to some sort of drug. For many, many types of drugs, these include drugs against viruses, drugs against cancers and so on, the viruses and the cancers can become resistant by giving mutations that allow them to escape from that drug. In many cases there are even multiple drugs out there and you might have options of which drug to administer, but you might not really know which one. Clinicians have sort of built up lore that this drug tends to work more often or you try this one and then you try this other one, but because how well the drug works is probably in general determined by either the genetic mutations in lets say the cancer or the person or the genetic mutations in the virus or pathogen, if you knew what the effects of those mutations were ahead of time, you could make much more intelligent decisions about which drugs to administer. And there really shouldnt be a drug that works only 50 percent of the time; youre probably just not giving it in the right condition 50 perfect of the time. Wed like to be able to pick the right drug for the right condition all the time.

TB: And thats what precision medicine is about.

Starita: Yes.

TB: Deep mutational scanning as a tool.

Starita: To inform precision medicine.

Bloom: These deep mutational scanning techniques were really developed by people like Jay Shendure and Stan Fields, and Lea and Doug Fowler to look at these questions of precision medicine from the perspective of changes in our human genomes affecting our susceptibility to diseases. I actually work on mutations in a different context, which has mutations in the viruses that infect us and make us sick. These viruses evolve quite rapidly. In the case of flu virus, youre supposed to get the flu vaccine every year. The reason why you have to get it every year is the virus is always changing and we have to make the vaccine keep up with the virus. The same thing is true with drugs against viruses like flu or HIV. Sometimes the viruses will be resistant, sometimes the drugs will work. These again have to do with the very rapid genetic changes that are happening in the virus. So, were trying to use deep mutational scanning to understand how these mutations to these viruses will affect their ability to, lets say, escape someones immunity or escape a drug that might be used to treat that person.

TB: How far along are you on that path?

Bloom: Were making progress. One of the key things weve found is that the same mutation of the virus might have a different impact for different people. So we found using these approaches that the ways that you mutate a virus will allow the virus sometimes to escape from one persons immunity much better than from another persons immunity. And so were really right now trying to map out the heterogeneity across different people. And hopefully that could be used to understand what makes some people susceptible to a very specific viral strain versus other people.

TB: And so then would your research extend into the mutations in human genes in addition to the changes in the virus?

Bloom: You could imagine eventually wanting to look at all of those combinations together, and we are very interested in this, but the immediate research were focusing on right now actually probably is not so much driven by the genetics of the humans. In the case of influenza virus, like I was saying, we found that if theres a virus that has some particular mutation, it might, lets say, allow it to escape from your immunity but not allow it to escape from the immunity of me or Lea. That doesnt seem to be driven as much we think by our genetics, but rather our exposure histories. So in the case of influenza, were not born with any immunity to influenza virus. We build up that immunity over the course of our lifetime because we either get infected with flu or we get vaccinated with flu and then our body makes an immune response, which includes antibodies which block the virus. Each of us have our own personal history, not genetic history, but life history of which vaccinations and which infections weve gotten. And so, that will shape how our immune response sees the virus. As a result, we think that that doesnt really have so much of a genetic component as a historical component.

TB: Just going with the flu example, could this result in a future big picture where I go in to get my flu vaccine and its different than the one the next person might go in to get?

Bloom: What we would most like to do is use this knowledge to just design a vaccine that works for everybody. So that would just be the same vaccine that everyone could get. But its a very interesting I think at this point I would say its almost in the thought experiment stage to think about this. When you think of something like cancer, like Lea was saying, you can use these tools to understand when people have mutations that might make them at risk for a cancer, but thats actually often a very hard thing to intervene for, right? Its not so easy to prevent someone from getting cancer even if you know theyre at risk. But obviously if people are able to do that, theyre interested in spending a lot of money to do it, because cancer is a very severe thing and you often have a very long window to treat it.

Something like a flu virus is very much at the other end. If I had the omniscient capability to tell you that three days from now youre going to get infected with flu and youre going to get really sick, we could prevent that. We have the technology basically right now to prevent that, if its nothing else than just telling you to put on a bunch of Purell and dont leave your bedroom. But theres also actually some pretty good interventions including prophylactics to flu that work quite well. But the key thing is, right now we think of everyone in the world as being at risk all the time and you cant be treating everybody in the world all the time against flu. Theres just too many people and the risk that any person

Starita: Not that much Tamiflu on the market.

Bloom: Not that much, and the risk of it So I think to the extent that we could really identify whos at the most risk in any given year, that might allow us to use these interventions in a more targeted way. Thats the idea.

TB: And how does deep mutational scanning lead to that potentially?

Bloom: Yeah. So the idea, and at this point, this is really in the research phase, but the idea is if we could identify that say certain people or certain segments of the population, that because of the way their immunity, lets say, is working makes them very susceptible to the viral mutant that happens to have arisen in this particular year, we could then somehow either suggest that theyre more at risk or, as you suggested, design a vaccine thats specifically tailored to work for them. So thats the idea. I should make clear that that is not anywhere close to anybody even thinking of putting it into economic practice at this point because even the concepts behind it are really quite new. But I do think that theres a lot of potential if we think of these infectious diseases not so much as an act of God, where you just happened to someone sneezed on you as youre walking down the street, but actually a complex interaction between the mutations in the virus and your own either genetics or immune system, we can start to identify who might be more at risk for certain things in certain years, and that would at least open the door to using a lot of interventions we already have.

Starita: The first year was three years ago, and some very enthusiastic graduate students started it. Basically, it was almost like a giant lab meeting where everybody who is interested in this field came. Somebody tweeted it out and then all of a sudden people from UCSF were there and were like, What the heck? It was great and we all talked about the technology and how we were using it. The next year, the Brotman Baty Institute came in and were like, OK, well, maybe if we use some of this gift to support this, we can have a bigger meeting. And then it was 200 people in a big auditorium and that was great. And now this year, its a two-day symposium and workshop, and its also co-sponsored by a grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute. But now weve got hundreds of people, so about 200 people again, but now flying in from all over the world. Weve got invited speakers, and the workshop, which is Tuesday, is a more practical, If youre interested in this, how do you actually do these experiments?

TB: Whats driving the interest in deep mutational scanning?

Bloom: We are starting to have so much genetic information about really everything. It used to be, going back a couple of decades, a big deal to determine even the sequence of a single flu virus. It was totally unthinkable to determine the sequence of a human genome, right? If you dont know what mutations are there, you dont really care that much what they do. Now we can determine the sequence of tens of thousands of flu viruses. I mean, this is happening all the time, and we can determine the sequence of thousands, even tens of thousands of human genomes. So now it becomes, as Lea said, really important to go from just getting these sequences to understanding what the mutations that you observe in these sequences actually will mean for human health.

See this site for more on the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine and the Deep Mutational Scanning Symposium and Workshop, Jan. 13 and 14 in Seattle. The symposium is free to attend if youre in the Seattle area, and it will also be livestreamed, with archived video available afterward.

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Scientists pursue new genetic insights for health: Inside the world of deep mutational scanning - GeekWire