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

Unique Rare Chromosome Disorder Support Group

Gene duplication leads to obesity in childhood syndrome

A team of researchers has discovered a genetic syndrome that causes childhood obesity, intellectual disability and seizures. The syndrome comes from an “unbalanced” chromosomal translocation: affected individuals have additional copies of genes from one chromosome and fewer copies of genes from another.

The results were published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition.

Katie Rudd, PhD, assistant professor of human http://www.raybanoutletes.com/ genetics at Emory University School of Medicine, is senior author of the paper. Research specialist Ian Goldlust, now a graduate student in the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program, is the first author. Co-authors include investigators from around the USA and Australia.

Rudd’s team was able to connect the contribution of one gene, GNB3, among many involved in the translocation, to the obesity aspect of the syndrome. Her lab created a mouse model with an extra copy of the GNB3 gene and found that the mice are obese. The mice are on average 6 percent (males) or 10 percent (females) heavier.

Rudd says her work was greatly assisted by collaboration with the Unique Rare Chromosome Disorder Support Group, a UK-based charity. Within Unique, a few parents had together found that their children had translocations involving the same chromosomes and similar symptoms. They contacted Rudd and helped her find additional affected families. Her study includes seven unrelated patients.

“It really was a group effort, and Unique was the linchpin,” she says. “Managing to find seven families with exactly the same rare translocation would have been extremely difficult otherwise.”

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