GCB News

The way we think about individual psychiatric illnesses may be changing.

The Rhodes Scholarship is one of the most prestigious awards granted to college students, with recipients selected on the basis of high academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential and a commitment to service. The Rhodes Trust provides full financial support for the pursuit of a degree at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Machine learning model foretells whether symbiotic relationships will thrive or collapse.

Duke's Bass Connections selected Ornit Chiba-Falek, Boris Kantor, and Misha Angrist's project under the Brain & Society theme. Their project, Gene Therapy in Alzheimer’s Disease: Novel Therapies and Ethical Aspects of Somatic Gene Editing, will advance development of new gene therapy technologies that will target age-related brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. Students will conduct research on Alzheimer’s disease etiology and mechanisms using cutting-edge genome editing technologies and state-of-the-art stem cell techniques.

In a gene editing experiment involving human induced pluripotent stem cells from a patient with a familial form of Parkinson's disease, turning up DNA methylation led to a downregulation of SNCA messenger-RNA and reduced alpha-synuclein protein levels by about a third — sufficient to reverse the mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular vulnerability, and neuronal death that are part of the disease's pathological phenotype.

Here are summaries of a selection of the papers published by GCB faculty in December 2018:

DISEASE AND MENTAL HEALTH

Charlie Gersbach was part of a team that used adeno-associated virus-mediated (AAV-mediated) CRISPR gene editing therapy on mouse models to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The team discovered they need to increase the levels of guide RNA to improve the effectiveness of this gene editing approach. Read more

Using CRISPR and other tools, scientists are modifying DNA methylation, histone marks, and other modifiers of gene expression to understand how they affect health and disease.

Status-health connection depends, in part, on what it takes to get ahead.

The Gilbert Family Foundation, a private foundation established by Jennifer and Dan Gilbert, announced its first major initiative around gene therapy research.

Life-course research includes criminality and anti-social behavior.