4 replies to this topic

[Lyle Dennis]

Gives us some clear targets to fous on:

http://extremelongev...-in-the-genome/

[Logic]

Strange that there is so little interest?
Working link:
http://news.unchealt...he-human-genome

"What we ended up with is a very interesting distribution of disease risk across the genome. More than 90 percent of the genome lacked any disease loci. Surprisingly, however, lots of diseases mapped to two specific loci, which soared above all of the others in terms of multi-disease risk. The first locus at chromosome 6p21, is where the major histocompatibility (MHC) locus resides. The MHC is critical for tissue typing for organ and bone marrow transplantation, and was known to be an important disease risk locus before genome-wide studies were available. Genes at this locus determine susceptibility to a wide variety of autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, celiac disease, Type I diabetes, asthma, psoriasis, and lupus,” said Jeck.
“The second place where disease associations clustered is the INK4/ARF (or CDKN2a) tumor suppressor locus. This area, in particular, was the location for diseases associated with aging: atherosclerosis, heart attacks, stroke, Type II diabetes, glaucoma and various cancers,” he added.
“The finding that INK4/ARF is associated with lots of cancer, and MHC is associated with lots of diseases of immunity is not surprising — these associations were known. What is surprising is the diversity of diseases mapping to just two small places: 30 percent of all tested human diseases mapped to one of these two places. This means that genotypes at these loci determine a substantial fraction of a person’s resistance or susceptibility to multiple independent diseases,”

[niner]

I missed this the first time around. INK4 showed up recently in a discussion of cellular senescence. Apparently it's mutated in many cancers, which makes sense since senescence is one of the cell's defenses against cancer. It's interesting how many important diseases map to a few loci. That suggests that it would be relatively easy to graft an improved version of those genes into an embryo in one fell swoop. Someday, anyway. Maybe the apparent lack of interest is related to the fact that while this is certainly interesting, it doesn't seem to be very actionable. In other words, it doesn't suggest anything that we could do for ourselves today. Another possibility is that it got pushed off the front page of active topics by troll posts, which are now under control.

[Mind]

I saw something similar here...how diseases are connected.

[nowayout]

Interesting, although the set of diseases linked to the first locus in the quote ("wide variety of autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, celiac disease, Type I diabetes, asthma, psoriasis, and lupus") are not diseases of aging.