News

Researchers from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have created the long-awaited animal model for Rett syndrome, one of the most common causes of mental retardation in females with an incidence of 1 in 10,000–15,000. The transgenic mouse model sheds much-needed light on the underlying mechanism of the disease and suggests a new reason for hope in the research toward therapies.

At the Whitehead Winter Lecture Series for High School Students, approximately 140 students from 40 area schools—and four students travelling from Singapore for the program—will hear about scientists’ efforts toward creating better therapies to combat HIV.

In a companion volume to the “Book of Life,” scientists have created the largest publicly available catalog of single letter DNA differences (SNPs)—1.4 million SNPs—with their exact location in the human genome. The SNP map promises to revolutionize both mapping diseases and tracing human history. Already, it is accelerating discovery of disease genes and providing a “fossil record” of human population history, which suggests that we are all descended from a small group of about 10,000 people.

These vignettes are referenced in the February 12, 2001, press release, "International Human Genome Mapping Consortium Publishes Physical Map of the Human Genome".

The Human Genome Project international consortium today announced the publication of a draft sequence and initial analysis of the human genome–the genetic blueprint for a human being. The paper appears in the Feb.15 issue of the journal Nature. The draft sequence, which covers more than 90 percent of the human genome, represents the exact order of DNA’s four chemical bases–commonly abbreviated as A, T, C, and G–along the human chromosomes. This DNA text influences everything from eye color and height, to aging and disease.

Researchers from the Whitehead Institute and Genset Corporation have found a new compound that controls weight gain in obese mice without affecting their food intake. The compound, called gAcrp30 and administered in daily low doses, caused profound and sustained weight loss in chubby mice eating a cafeteria diet—meals high in fat and sugar and available in unlimited quantities. Continuing the low daily doses allowed the mice to keep the weight off over a sustained period of time despite their fattening diet.

At first glance, yeast growing on a jello-like medium look breathtakingly beautiful—like gossamer flowers with radial spokes emanating from a central hub (see cover of Science). But a florid fungus can be a dangerous beauty, able to coat medical implants with thin films causing serious complications in patients with hip and valve replacements. In fact, every year thousands of deaths can be traced to fungal infections around medical implants.

In a promising advance in the war against AIDS, scientists have designed a potent, new protein that can prevent HIV infection by blocking its entry into human cells. The protein, called 5-Helix and designed to bind to a region in the HIV coat protein gp41, is able to prevent a wide range of HIV strains from fusing to the cell membrane and thereby infecting it.

Researchers at the Whitehead Institute and Corning Inc. have invented a powerful new mircroarray technique that can decipher the function of master switches in a cell by identifying the circuit, or the set of genes, they control across the entire genome. The researchers show that the technique can correctly identify the circuits controlled by two known master switches in yeast. In addition, the technique allows researchers to unravel in a week what takes years to achieve by conventional methods.

Settling a hotly debated issue in the field of cloning, a team of researchers from the Whitehead Institute and the University of Hawaii has shown that the egg can reset the developmental clock of a female adult cell, first reversing and then faithfully reproducing an early genetic event called X-inactivation. X-inactivation is a process by which one of two X chromosomes in female embryos is randomly silenced during development.