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
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HLA

Autoimmune gene link for subtype of juvenile arthritis

Geneticist Sampath Prahalad and the families he works with were part of this recent PNAS paper, which probes genetic risk factors for systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis.

There are several subtypes of juvenile arthritis, and sJIA (systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis) sounds especially painful because of its inflammatory symptoms: daily spiking fever and skin rashes in addition to joint pain.

The international team of investigators assembled what they report as the largest collection of sJIA patients (close to 1000) and identified HLA-DRB1*11 as a genetic risk factor for sJIA.

HLA-DRB1 alleles have also been linked to autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes and (adult) rheumatoid arthritis. The finding strengthens the case for trying existing medications that target T cell activation in sJIA. Read more

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment