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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
December 2012: The Power of Sequencing Single Cell Genomes
As the fundamental unit of life, each cell contains a complete copy of an organism's genome, which can undergo dynamic DNA mutations as the cell grows and divides. Studying the genomes of single cells is important for tracking global patterns of change across hundreds or thousands of individual cells, and will help to elucidate changes that occur in DNA over time. In this issue of Genome Advance, we focus on a novel technique that allows researchers to accurately sequence a single cell. (more)
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