Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

fertility

The very first cells

Please welcome cell biologist Dorothy Lerit to Emory.

Dorothy Lerit, PhD

She was the lead author on a recent Cell Reports paper on primordial germ cell formation in Drosophila, along with colleagues from NHLBI, where she was a postdoc, as well as Princeton, UVA and Columbia. Primordial germ cells are the cells that are destined to become sperm or eggs.

Germ cells are the very first cells that form out of the embryo, Lerit says. Lab Land is reminded of Lewis Wolpert’s claim that gastrulation – the separation of an apparently uniform group of embryonic cells into three germ layers — is “truly the most important time in your life.” Germ cell specification, certainly important from the viewpoint of future generations, occurs even before gastrulation.

In the Cell Reports paper, Lerit was examining the function of a particular gene called Germ cell-less; remember that Drosophila genes are often named after the effects of a mutation in the gene.

Drosophila development is superficially quite different from that of mammals. In particular, for a while the early embryo becomes a bag full of cell nuclei — without membranes separating them — known as a syncytium. This is the time when Germ cell-less function is important.

Amazing picture of germ cell formation from HHMI/Nature Cell Biology/Ruth Lehmann’s lab https://www.hhmi.org/node/16760/devel

Lerit’s background is in studying the centrosome, the place in the cell where microtubules meet, and critical for orderly cell division and for ensuring that “germline fate determinants” are sequestered to the right primordial cells.

Despite the differences between insect and mammalian embryo development, the function of Germ cell-less seems to have been conserved in evolution since problems with the human version of the gene are linked to sterility in men.

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Fertility: a new frontier in treating those with HIV

HIV

Not long ago, physicians who treated those with HIV focused only on helping their patients stay well. Today some physicians are also beginning to focus on helping those patients conceive.

“Most of the patients who are now diagnosed with HIV are in their reproductive years, and as many as a third express a desire to have children,” says Emory reproductive endocrinologist Vitaly Kushnir, MD.

This emerging area of treatment has been made possible thanks to the growing effectiveness of a combination of drugs known as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy, or HAART, used for years to treat retroviruses, including HIV.

“Now that people with HIV are living longer, fertility and HIV is an emerging area of interest,” says Kushnir. “Several studies have indicated that HIV drugs if given early in the course of the disease can reduce the risk of transmission from an HIV-positive person to an HIV-negative person.”

But researchers and physicians know very little yet about how treatments for HIV, the virus itself, and the comorbidities associated with HIV affect fertility. So, Kushnir and his colleague, Emory pathologist William Lewis, MD, decided it was time to explore existing data on how HIV and its treatment affect fertility, especially in women. Their review paper on the subject appears in the August 2011 issue of Fertility and Sterility.

Because there are safety concerns and legal restrictions on fertility treatments in couples in which one partner is HIV positive and the other is not, treatment options often are limited.

“This is becoming more and more of an issue,” says Kushnir. “It’s probably time for us to have a more open discussion about the access these patients have to fertility treatment. I think the current system probably discourages these patients from pursuing treatments that are a lot safer than trying to get pregnant on their own.”

Posted on by admin in Immunology Leave a comment