Current Genomics - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2006

Migraine is a complex debilitating neurovascular disease affecting approximately 15% of the Western populations. Familial clustering, twin studies and segregation analyses suggest that migraine has a significant genetic component, but the number of genes involved remains unclear. The progress in migraine genetics has recently jumped ahead with the identification of genes responsible for Familiar Hemiplegic Migraine (F Read More

As predicted, in the post-genomic era microarray technology has a major impact on our understanding of complex gene expression patterns and circuit function in the brain. We increasingly appreciate that, due to the phenotypic and transcript complexity, brain transcriptome profiling data are multifaceted and are best interpreted in the context of the cellular diversity of the studied brain region. However, despite advances mad Read More

The prolongation of skeletal muscle strength in aging and neuromuscular disease has been the objective of numerous studies employing a variety of approaches. To date however, efforts to prevent or attenuate age- or disease-related muscle degeneration have been largely unsuccessful. Cell-based therapies have been stalled by the difficulty in obtaining sufficient numbers of autologous myoblasts and by inefficient incorporati Read More

The functional analysis of plant genes employs various comprehensive approaches that include transcriptome analysis using microchips, gene knockout, RNA interference, and various experimental models. We have proposed a novel experimental model approach for plant functional genomics. It is based on creating and studying transgenic plants that express bacterial genes which are functionally similar to plant gen Read More

Genome sequences from the pufferfishes Takifugu rubripes (Fugu) and Tetraodon nigroviridis, the zebrafish Danio rerio and the medaka Oryzias latipes together with genomic data from various other fish species have opened an important era of comparative genomics shedding a new light on the structure and evolution of vertebrate genomes. For instance, comparative analysis of fish genomes has revealed that the ancestral Read More

Because of its paramount importance in many biological and biomedical aspects, epistasis, expressed as the suppression or enhancement of a gene by the effect of an unrelated gene, has received a resurgence of interest in recent years. One of the most powerful analytical approaches for detecting epistasis is based on the genetic mapping of interacting quantitative trait loci (QTL) that often present long chromosomal seg Read More