GCB News

Defining pathogen responses to first-line antibiotics could prolong their usefulness.

Mouse studies reveal cells and proteins in young animals that can boost healing in the old.

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

CANCER

Raluca Gordan was part of a team investigating the genetic variants associative with levels of circulating angiogenic proteins in cancer patients. Read more

Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi are two of the 44 Duke faculty included on the 2018 Highly Cited Researchers list compiled by Clarivate Analytics and Web of Science.

Duke is tied for 12th in the worldwide rankings by number of highly cited researchers this year. Duke is 9th among U.S. institutions, which are by far the most-cited institutions.

A high citation rate is an indication that a researcher’s work is influential in their field. In both 2016 and 2017, Duke was the fifth-highest cited U.S. institution.

Center for Genomic and Computational Biology (GCB) Director Greg Wray is one of five faculty members and one staff member from Duke to be named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He is among six new fellows at Duke and 416 total new fellows across the nation this year who are being recognized for outstanding efforts to advance science or its applications.

Senior Ariel Kantor, has been awarded a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. He is one of three Duke seniors and 32 undergraduates nationwide to receive the award this year and one of only 45 Duke undergrads to win since the scholarship’s inception in 1904.

While each of us may only appear to be one individual, living creature, that’s not entirely the case. Our bodies are full of viruses, fungi, bacteria, and other microscopic organisms that sit on our surface and live within our organs. Although it may gross you out when you think about it, we need these microbial communities – known as our microbiome – to digest food, support our immune system, synthesize vitamins, and even maintain our mental health.

RNA changes mark old blood cells among new ones, foiling self-transfusions.

Terrie E. Moffitt, Ph.D., the Nannerl O. Keohane University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke, has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, an honorific society for exceptional leaders. Established by Congress in 1863, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine provide objective advice to policy makers on matters of science, technology, and health.

When four Duke researchers developed an innovative technique for exploring the non-coding genome—the 98 percent of our DNA that does not encode protein sequences, often called the genome’s “dark matter”—the implications were clear. Their approach, using technologies including CRISPR gene editing to shed new light on gene regulation, has enormous potential to guide development of new drugs to combat a host of genetic diseases.