Health News

How cancer prevention drives aging
For the first time, researchers have found how cellular senescence, the well-known mechanism for preventing cancer, can trigger aging and age-related disease by changing the local tissue environment. ANI

Scientists unveil genes vital to vital to adult heart function
In a study on fruit fly Drosophila, scientists at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) have found that genes involved in embryonic heart development are vital to adult heart function in both fruit flies and humans. ANI

Psychiatric disorders common among college-aged
A new study has revealed that psychiatric disorders appear to be common among 18- to 24-year-olds, with overall rates similar among those attending or not attending college. ANI

Scientist unravels metabolic properties of two deadly pathogens

A scientist from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia Health System has unravelled the metabolic properties of two deadly pathogens, Leishmania major and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Washington, May 19 : A scientist from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia Health System has unravelled the metabolic properties of two deadly pathogens, Leishmania major and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Using network analysis methods for investigation, Jason Papin, Ph.D., principle investigator in the Computational Systems Laboratory at UVA, discovered how the two pathogens survive and also found out the genes, which when knocked out, cause them to weaken.

Leishmania major causes Leishmaniasis, a disease caused by the bite of sand flies and currently affects US soldiers fighting in Iraq. On the other hand, Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen that mainly affects immunocompromised patients and facilitates 10 percent of hospital acquired infections. Pseudomonas is matter of concern due to its resistance to nearly all available antibiotics.

"By discovering the metabolic properties of these pathogens we can figure out how they grow and live. Once broken down, a variety of gene sequences can be deleted in silico to see if it will halt the progress of the pathogen. This could lead to new drugs or vaccines for the treatment and prevention of their effects," said Papin.

Recently, he used some computer-based methods to predict the essentiality of metabolic genes in Pseudomonas, a study that would have taken years in a traditional laboratory.

And now, Papin can run all possible gene combinations from the metabolism of a pathogen using a computer in matter of a few minutes. Amongst thousands of possibilities, the computer finds the most probable combinations necessary to sustain the life of the pathogen. These discoveries can lead to new and better therapies that target the life-sustaining forces of these two pathogens.

"Systems analysis has become a requirement for making sense of high-throughput data and for characterizing properties of biological networks. In order to extend these recent developments to medical applications, there is a pressing need for reconstructing and analyzing the networks that direct cellular processes," said Papin.

He also found that the metabolic network of Leishmania major contains many genes across multiple metabolic processes critical to the general function of the pathogen.

And in case of Pseudomonas aeruginosa pathogen, Papin is currently comparing network-generated data about the metabolic network using existing genome data in order to have a better understanding of the genetic and environmental relationships in this versatile pathogen.

"Scientists who work in drug development need to know what to target in order to make better drugs. Through network analysis, we can get them this information faster than we could just ten years ago," said Papin.

ANI