Hoping to develop a treatment that works more broadly across diseases, a Penn Vet team used canine disease models to closely examine how retinal
gene activity varied during the progression of three different forms of inherited vision disease.
In their recent paper, the researchers not only looked at the genetic code, but also studied how
gene activity varied between the two populations.
Not exact matches
Most
genes have hundreds of such sequences, with
varying activity and uniqueness in the genome.
They found that more than half of the 7,000
genes expressed in the liver
vary in
activity from one layer to another, a number that is about ten times greater than previous estimates.
For example, investigators found that for the mouse immune system, metabolic processes and stress response, the
activity of some
genes varied between mice and humans, which echoes earlier research.
Perera turned the full beam of her attention on Tycko as he explained how the cord - blood samples showed that the
gene's
activity varied and that it
varied in ways that suggested the differences were not random but environmentally influenced.
Which parent a chromosome comes from is important because the
activity of some
genes varies depending on whether the
genes are on a chromosome inherited from the mother or from the father.
The researchers discovered that DNA methylation — a fundamental, life - long process in which a methyl group is added or removed from the cytosine molecule in DNA to promote or suppress
gene activity and expression — does in fact
vary between FLS from the knees and hips of RA patients.
The finding suggests that these
varied Wnt
genes regulate Smed - beta - catenin - 1
activity to provide the positional information by which the organism specifies the location of its head and tail during regeneration.