Monday, November 24, 2008

Journal Club Presentation


Dear Dato'/Prof/ Assoc. Prof/ Dr/ colleagues;

IMMB Journal Club will be held as follows:

Topic : Gene mutations in exfoliated cells as molecular markers for oral squamous cell carcinoma.
Presenter: Cik Norul Hajar Che Ghazali
Chairperson : Cik Nur Suhana Hamzah
Venue : IMMB Meeting Room, Level 13, Block 5, S&T Building
Date : 26 November, Wednesday
Time : 12.45 noon

Your participation are most welcome. Thank you.


Committee

Monday, November 17, 2008

Journal club


Dear Dato'/Prof/ Assoc. Prof/ Dr/ colleagues,

IMMB Journal Club will be held as follows:

Topic : ORAL PRESENTATION SKILLS
Speaker : Mr. MOHAMAD ROS SIDEK
Chairperson : Mrs. SHARIDA
Venue : IMMB Office, Level 13, Block 5, S&T Building
Date : 19 November, Wednesday
Time : 12.45 noon

Refreshment will be served starting from 12.15 noon at Level 13.
All are welcome.

See you there !

Thanks& warm regards,
ZD

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

IMMB new building

outside the gate

signboard





IMMB members




building model inside the glass





IMMB


RC



IMMB

CTC


Date: 24th October 2008 (Friday)

Venue: New Campus at Sungai Buloh, Selangor

Site visit by the IMMB members and Faculty members

Thank you for Vamed Engineering Sdn. Bhd and Tunas Selatan Consortium Sdn. Bhd

IMMB Raya Celebration








Date: 23rd October 2008 (Thursday)

Venue: IMMB

Participants : IMMB members

Monday, November 10, 2008

Journal Club



Dear Prof/Assoc.Prof/ Dr /colleagues,

This is to announce that the Journal Club IMMB will resume this Wednesday and the details are as follows :-

Speaker : Mr. MOHD FAEEZ SARULAN
Chairperson : Mr. MOHAMAD ROS SIDEK
Venue : IMMB Office, Level 13
Date : 12th November 2008 (Wednesday)
Time : 12.45 noon

All are welcome and refreshment will be served starting from 12 noon.

Thanks & warm regards,
ZD

Saturday, November 8, 2008


Focus


Focus on Reproductive Biology. In what direction is the field of reproductive biology going? By bringing together input from top scientists and decision makers interested in this field, this focus identifies the recent papers with the most impact in reproductive biology and identifies the key issues that are shaping our thinking in this field.

http://www.nature.com/nm/focus/reprod/index.html


Workshop on


Microgravity Sciences


2nd - 3rd September 2008


Putrajaya International Concention Centre (PICC)





Members of IMMB and the Research Lab participated in the workshop by presenting new findings from the 2 Angkasawan projects.

Friday, November 7, 2008

What is genetic testing?



Genetic testing is defined as a type of medical test that identifies changes either in chromosomes, genes, or proteins. Most of the time, testing is used to find changes that are associated with inherited disorders. With the advent of molecular biology and biotechnology, genetic testing is now becoming more popular from the public. Several hundred genetic tests are currently in use, and more are being developed. The results of a genetic test can confirm or rule out a suspected genetic condition or help determine a person’s chance of developing or passing on a genetic disorder. In forensic, genetic testing can be used to discreminate suspect from the control.

As it generally accepted genetic testing is voluntary. Because testing has both benefits and limitations, the decision about whether to be tested is a personal and complex one. A genetic counselor can help by providing information about the pros and cons of the test and discussing the social and emotional aspects of testing.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Complete cancer genome sequenced for the first time


Nov. 6, 2008
For the first time, a complete cancer genome, and incidentally a complete female genome, has been decoded, scientists report online Nov. 5 in Nature. In a study made possible by faster, cheaper and more sensitive methods for sequencing DNA, the researchers pinpoint eight new genes that may cause a cell to turn cancerous.

These acute myeloid leukemia cells are from the bone marrow of the female patient whose complete genome was sequenced in the first decoding of a complete cancer genome. The genetic study implicated eight genes not previously associated with this form of cancer.
“Since cancer is a disease of the genome, this newfound ability to determine the complete DNA sequence of a cancer cell is enormously powerful,” comments Francis Collins, a geneticist and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., a group that raced to sequence the first entire human genome.
“We need to know the genetic rules of cancer,” says coauthor Timothy Ley of Washington University in St. Louis. Ley and colleagues read each of the 3 billion building blocks of DNA from tumor cells in a woman with acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, a highly malignant form of blood and bone marrow cancer. Then the team compared the long string of code with one taken from noncancerous skin cells from the same woman.
This new sequencing technology, called massively parallel sequencing, makes it possible to compare the normal DNA sequence to the cancerous DNA sequence in the same patient. That, in turn, allows researchers to find individual DNA bases—the needles in a haystack of 3 billion pieces of straw—that had mutated in the cancerous cells.
Kevin Shannon, director of the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of California, San Francisco, studies the genes that may lead to leukemia and calls this work “a major achievement,” one that is “remarkable for its rigor and precision.
”None of the researchers knew what to expect for the number of mutated genes in the cancerous cells.
“We were flying blind,” says Ley.
But after rigorously pruning the data to keep only the most significant mutations, the researchers identified 10 mutations, eight of which were in genes never before implicated in AML. Of these eight new mutations, none were found to be mutated in tumors from other, smaller-scale studies, suggesting that individual AML cases are distinct.
It may be that the disease is so specific doctors will need to sequence each individual with AML to determine the best course of treatment, says coauthor Elaine Mardis, also of Washington University.
At the same time, because those earlier studies did not sequence the entire genome, and because this new study had a sample size of only one patient, it is too early to tell if AML has different kinds of mutations in different patients.So, equally possible is that common mutations in similar groups of genes may contribute to AML.
Discovery of these gene networks could allow doctors to use these common pathways of disease to treat patients similarly.“It’s fun to speculate,” Maris says, “but we just don’t know.”
Understanding the genetic basis of cancer could lead to highly personalized treatments, says Mardis. “Right now, they’re all treated the same way they were 25 years ago,” she says of AML patients. It would be nice, Mardis says, if doctors could tell their patients, “Here’s what we know about your disease, and here are your best treatment options.”
Although scientists read every base pair in the patient’s genome, they only analyzed mutations in the DNA sequences that produce proteins, an estimated meager 1 to 2 percent of the human genome. To find mutations in other regions called intergenic DNA will require intensive statistical analyses. “We haven’t finished the job,” says Ley.
Because this study was designed to find genes that were mutated in a cancer genome, researchers omitted the DNA sequences from the sex chromosomes, the Xs and Ys, when making comparisons. Little is known about the differences between a male and a female genome.
The research team currently has funding to support more cancer genome sequences in the next few years. “What we need are thousands of genomes from each cancer,” says Ley. “We’ve already started a second patient, and are nearly finished, but our hopes are to do more.”
SOURCE: Science News

R&D DailyAdvantage Business MediaRockaway, NJ, 07866

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

High-throughput methods from molecular biology are about to change daily clinical practice...




Article Review by Hrvojka Bosnjak, Kresimir Pavelic & Sandra Kraljevic Pavelic


The sequencing of the human genome was an enormous achievement in more than one sense as both the annotated sequence and the bioinformatics tools developed have become enormously important to biomedical research. In addition, the technological advances made during the project have further promoted the new ‘-omics’ approach in molecular biology research; it is a global, systematic and comprehensive way of identifying and describing the molecular processes and pathways involved in physiological functions and pathological states. Since the start of the Human Genome Project in 1990, its proponents have pointed out that the knowledge gained could lead to new cures or preventive measures for a wide range of diseases, as well as enormous benefits to general health.

A recent white paper by the European Medical Research Council (Strasbourg, France) explicitly encourages the use of new -omics technologies, as well as systems biology, nanomedicine, regenerative medicine, and tissue and stem-cell banking, in order to improve clinical and medical practice .....(get full article here : http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v9/n11/pdf/embor2008198.pdf )

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

The Scientist: NewsBlog:
Frozen mouse cloned
Posted by Edyta Zielinska
[Entry posted at 4th November 2008 03:42 PM GMT]

Comment on this blog

While restoring dinosaurs from preserved mosquitoes remains as scientifically implausible as it was when the hit science fiction film Jurassic Park was made in 1993, the possibility of cloning the woolly mammoth and other extinct species just became a little bit more real. In this week's PNAS, researchers report "resurrecting" a mouse frozen for 16 years via nuclear cell transfer. "It is a major breakthrough" said Pasqualino Loi a biomedical researcher from Teramo University in Italy, who was not involved in the study. "There is hot debate on going," wrote Loi in an Email, "on the possibility to 'restore' extinct mammals, with the [woolly] mammoth in pole position." "If you had asked me five years ago" whether such a feat were possible, said Peter Mombaerts a molecular neurogeneticist Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, who was not involved in the study, "I would have said 'no way.'" Standard nuclear cell transfer involves taking a live nucleus from a donor cell and implanting it into an oocyte. Ice crystals that form upon freezing, however, kill the cells unless they are treated with a cryoprotectants. In this study, Teruhiko Wakayama at RIKEN's Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan and colleagues bypassed the need for intact cells by isolating only the nuclei of cells taken from the brain, tail blood, liver, heart and other tissues taken from a thawed mouse that had been frozen for 16 years. They transferred the nuclei into mouse oocytes from which the nuclei had been removed, using a slightly modified nuclear transfer technique. Donor nuclei from the brain provided the best success rate, the researchers found. That was surprising, said Mombaerts, since "few successes have been reported with [cloning using] neuronal cells." The researchers speculated that the high glucose content in the brain might act as a cryoprotectant, shielding cells from damage. Once the researchers had established nuclear transfer embryonic stem (ntES) cell lines, they performed a second round of nuclear transfer into oocytes and implanted them into surrogate mothers which were brought to term. Four cloned mice were born from the 16 year-old frozen mouse, as well as clones of another strain of mouse that was frozen for one week. Previously, others had tried similar techniques. For example Mombaerts' group was able to generate a cloned mouse from isolated cells that had been frozen by inserting the entire thawed cell into an oocyte. But so far, no one had produced viable offspring from the dead cells of a thawed intact body. Aside from resurrecting the woolly mammoth or spurring plans to create a frozen Noah's Arc of species on the brink of extinction, the study has more immediate practical applications. Mombaerts, who, like many mouse researchers, keeps frozen "tail-tips" of mice he's cloned, said this technique could enable him to bring back "particularly precious" mouse strains for research. Ultimately, it could also make whole genome sequencing of frozen or extinct species possible by allowing researchers to multiply entire genomes within ntES cell lines prior to sequencing, though Mombaerts cautions this application will "not work in the near future." Wakayama, for one, couldn't help reaching for the more fantastical implications, however. He enjoyed the movie Jurassic Park, he said, and he would be pleased to see someone try cloning dinosaurs using his technique. Loi, however, noted that times have changed -- it might be possible to bring back the wooly mammoth, he speculated, but would it be wise to do so "in a global warming scenario?"

Journal Club


Dear Prof/Assoc Prof/ Dr/colleagues,



This is to announce that the Journal Club IMMB will resume this Wednesday and the details are as follows :-

Speaker : DR.GABRIELE ANISAH FROEMMING
Chairperson : MR. MOHAMAD ROS SIDEK
Venue : IMMB Office, Level 13
Date : 5th November 2008 ( Wednesday )
Time : 12.45 noon

All are welcome.

Thanks & warm regards,
ZD

Welcome to IMMB Blog

Dear IMMB, UiTM members and visitors,



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