SEPTEMBER News:
“Stem cells have incredible potential for use in treating disease, so there is a great deal of interest in trying to understand what it is that regulates their proliferation and differentiation,” says Dr. Ryan. “This grant is a part of that overall effort.” CHORI Holds Annual Summer Student Research SymposiumAlthough CHORI is a stand-alone research institute unaffiliated with any university, fostering the next generation of scientists is one of CHORI's core values, and no small part of what makes this institute so special. A hallmark of CHORI's deep commitment to education and mentoring young scientists-to-be, this year's Summer Student Research Program culminated on August 13, 2010, with the annual Research Symposium. "This year was an overwhelming success. The students' presentations were spectacular, the sessions for oral and poster presentations were so well attended by both CHORI and non-CHORI scientists that we are looking to expand to a larger venue next year," says CHORI scientist and co-director Vasanthy Narayanaswami, PhD. |
 CHORI Scientists Discover Reproductive Stage in Leishmania Parasites In the cover publication of the September/October issue of The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology, CHORI scientists David M. Iovannisci, PhD, C. Paul Plested, PhD, and Gregory R Moe, PhD reveal first-time in vitro evidence of a newly identified sexual reproductive stage in the lifecycle of the Leishmania parasite responsible for afflicting 12 million people in 88 different countries across the globe. The study is a landmark discovery, which lays the foundation for the development of new genetic approaches to investigating this debilitating disease. “What identifying this sexual reproductive stage means is that researchers now will be able to study the genetics of the parasite in the natural setting, as well as to more easily investigate genetic characteristics of interest for developing new avenues of treatment,” says Dr. Iovannisci. Read More! |
 CHORI Scientist's Research Featured in Two Nature Publications Two groundbreaking studies by interdisciplinary researchers working collectively to confirm the benefit of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) were published in the August 5 issue of Nature. The first study, a landmark collaboration with over 100 experts, tripled the capability of GWAS to identify variations in the human genome associated with lipid disorders known to impact heart disease. The second study carried out a series of investigations based on a GWAS finding that identified for the first time the sortlin pathway as a major player in increasing levels of low-density lipoproteins (LDL), which are associated with increased risk for heart disease. "There has been a debate as to how effective GWAS are for capturing the genetic variations responsible for complex diseases," explains CHORI senior scientist, Ronald Krauss, MD, whose lab participated in the collective efforts. "As a result, the idea was to increase these genome searches to as large a scale as possible by collaborating with other labs, and to then target the genetic variations identified for deeper analysis." Read More! |
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