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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Tim Read

Metagenomics explainer

A term we heard a bunch at the Emory Microbiome Symposium in November was “metagenomics”. Time for an explainer, with some help from Emory geneticist Tim Read.

Nature Reviews Microbiology defines metagenomics as “genomic analysis of microbial DNA that is extracted directly from communities in environmental samples.”

This technology — genomics on a huge scale — enables a survey of the different microorganisms present in a specific environment, such as water or soil, to be carried out. Metagenomics is also emerging as a tool for clinical diagnosis of infectious diseases.

Read notes that the term specifically refers to “shotgun” sequencing of environmental DNA.

“The shotgun approach is to randomly sample small pieces of the DNA in the tube, no matter which organism they came from,” he says. “The output is a mélange of different genes from bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants and humans.  The data is fascinating but the analysis is daunting.” Read more

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized 1 Comment

Detecting clandestine chlamydia

In recent years public health authorities have raised concern that many strains of Chlamydia trachomatis, a bacterium that is the most common cause of sexually transmitted infections around the world, can be missed by conventional genetic tests. A mutation in part of its genomc can make Chlamydia undetectable by the most commonly used tests.

Microfluidic

The Chlamydia tests are performed in a microfluidic cassette platform and data is returned about an hour after sample collection. In comparison, standard tests take a day or longer.

Most infections are asymptomatic but left untreated, Chlamydia infection can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility and ectopic pregnancy. It is also a Ray Ban online leading cause of blindness in developing countries.

Microbial geneticist Tim Read at Emory has been collaborating with Deborah Dean at Children’s Hospital Oakland and the Massachusetts firm NetBio to develop a fast, accurate and sensitive genetic test for Chlamydia.

“We used tools that were developed initially to answer basic scientific questions,” Read says. “We compared multiple genomes of C. trachomatis to find targets that would work across a broad selection of bacterial strains.”

Read more

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment