Pakistan
Unraveling the Biocircuitry of Obesity
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Mouse neurons (purple), with their nuclei (blue) and primary cilia (green).
Credit: Yi Wang, Vaisse Lab, UCSF
Obesity involves the complex interplay of diet, lifestyle, genetics, and even the bacteria living in the gut. But there are other less-appreciated factors that are likely involved, and a new NIH-supported study suggests one that you probably never would have imagined: antenna-like sensory projections on brain cells.
The study in mice, published in the journal Nature Genetics [1], suggests these neuronal projections, called primary cilia, are a key part of a known “hunger circuit,” which receives signals from other parts of the body to control appetite. The researchers add important evidence in mouse studies showing that changes in the primary cilia can produce a short circuit, impairing the brain’s ability to regulate appetite and leading to overeating and obesity.
Missing Genes Point to Possible Drug Targets
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Every person’s genetic blueprint, or genome, is unique because of variations that occasionally occur in our DNA sequences. Most of those are passed on to us from our parents. But not all variations are inherited—each of us carries 60 to 100 “new mutations” that happened for the first time in us. Some of those variations can knock out the function of a gene in ways that lead to disease or other serious health problems, particularly in people unlucky enough to have two malfunctioning copies of the same gene. Recently, scientists have begun to identify rare individuals who have loss-of-function variations that actually seem to improve their health—extraordinary discoveries that may help us understand how genes work as well as yield promising new drug targets that may benefit everyone.
In a study published in the journal Nature, a team partially funded by NIH sequenced all 18,000 protein-coding genes in more than 10,500 adults living in Pakistan [1]. After finding that more than 17 percent of the participants had at least one gene completely “knocked out,” researchers could set about analyzing what consequences—good, bad, or neutral—those loss-of-function variations had on their health and well-being.
