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Genetic mystery of Behcet’s disease unfolds along the ancient Silk Road
Bethesda, Md., Sun., Jan. 6, 2013 — Researchers have identified four new regions on the human genome associated with Behcet's disease, a painful and potentially dangerous condition found predominantly in people with ancestors along the Silk Road. For nearly 2,000 years, traders used this 4,000-mile network linking the Far East with Europe to exchange goods, culture and, in the case of the Silk Road disease, genes. National Institutes of Health researchers and their Turkish and Japanese collaborators published their findings in the Jan. 6, 2013, advance online issue of Nature Genetics. (
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New England Journal of Medicine Series on Genomic Medicine
A series of articles on the quest to screen, prevent and treat disease in the new world of genomic medicine.
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Genome Advance of the Month
January 2013: Fitting the National Archives in your pocket
Nick Goldman, Ph.D., and Ewan Birney, Ph.D., researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, wandered off on a tangent over a couple of beers, and instead of their usual mission of decoding genomic information, they decided to try the opposite problem: encoding information in DNA. The January Genome Advance of the Month features an article that began as a somewhat facetious idea for where to store big data. (more)
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