BioMed Central Blog

November highlights from Genome Medicine: miRNA as a biomarker, RNA-seq, diabetes and more

November’s issue of Genome Medicine reflects the excitement in the field about the potential for RNA to act as a biomarker for disease and to help researchers unravel the underlying disease mechanism.

MicroRNAs, which are short RNAs of around 22 nucleotides, are attracting a lot of interest for detecting and predicting the outcome of a disease. In a Research Highlight, Florian Kuchenbauer and colleagues reflect on the recent finding that microRNAs are expressed at different levels in blood in different diseases, which could lead to blood-based diagnosis of disease. This issue also features a Research Article by Rotem Ben-Hamo and Sol Efroni, which indicates a role for microRNA hsa-miR-9, along with the p38 network,  in predicting the prognosis of patients with the brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme (see blog to find out more).

The other Research Highlight this month examines a new assay, termed CaptureSeq, that enriches low-level RNA transcripts for high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq).

Recently, Genome Medicine has highlighted the increasing clinical impact of pharmacogenomic research, and in a Review Article by Jose Florez and Chunmei Huang the authors look at insights emerging  from the pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic studies of type 2 diabetes.

Stuart Orkin, Guest Editor of our Focus on Stem Cells, and Jonghwan Kim have provided a Review on embryonic stem cell-specific signatures in cancer.

Meeting reports in the journal are proving to be popular, and this month is no exception. Have a look at the Report of the Wellcome Trust meeting on Epigenomics of common disease and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Report on Personal Genomes.

If you missed last month’s issue, you can look at it here. Elad Ziv and colleagues’ Research Article attracted a lot of interest, as the first report that doctors do change prescriptions for patients with breast cancer when they receive genotyping information. David Gurwitz and Jeantine Lunshof discuss this study and the implications for personalized medicine in an associated Research Highlight.

Other highly accessed articles from last month include Alan Wright’s Report on the Wellcome Trust conference on the Genomics of Common Diseases, Huck-Hui Ng’s review  article on transcriptomic analysis of stem cells, and Wyeth Wasserman’s Review of the methods and software for predicting functional variation within the cis-regulatory sequences.

Posted by Maria Hodges at 16:57    Comments (0)