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AUSTRALIA — Dietitians Warn against Self-diagnosed Food Allergies.

AUSTRALIA — Stem Cell Treatment for Brittle Bones in the Womb.

AUSTRALIA — Spine Surgery “Sewn Up” before First Cut.

AUSTRALIA — Grant to Boost Unique Heart Disease Research, Australia.

AUSTRALIA — Australia's First Fertilizer Research Center.

AUSTRALIA — Queensland Technology Licensed by Billion-Dollar US Company.

AUSTRALIA — Hair Sample May Provide Breast Cancer Diagnosis.

CHINA — Omnicare Clinical Opens Offices in China.

CHINA — Controversial Stem Cell Treatment Attracts Thousands.

CHINA — Olive Ingredient Improves Eye Health.

INDIA — Indian Medicinal Plant May Combat Liver Cancer.

INDIA — Meningococcemia Claims Six in Indian Capital.

INDIA — In Vitro Fertilization Facility Now at AIIMS.

INDIA — Satyam Makes Telemedicine Available in Remote Villages.

INDIA — US-based Hollister to Set Up Unit in Haryana.

INDIA — Operation Eyesight Universal to Spend US$4 Million in India.

INDIA — Avesthagen Launches Seven New Botanical Bioactives.

JAPAN — Optimal Band Imaging and Endoscopy to Detect Early Gastric Cancer.

JAPAN — New Bird Flu Outbreak in Japan treated to H5N1.

SINGAPORE — QIAGEN Opens New Service Solutions Center in Asia.

SINGAPORE — Biomedical Research Council Awards US$29 Million to 61 Research Projects.

SINGAPORE — A*STAR Launches New Award for Young Scientists.

SINGAPORE — A*STAR Signs MOU with Six Schools to Form Technology Network.

SINGAPORE — SGH Launches First Holistic Care Center.

NEW ZEALAND — Science New Zealand Launched.

TAIWAN — Cholesterol–lowering Drug is Effective against Staphylococcus aureus.

VIETNAM — Dead Poultry Raises Bird Flu Alarm in Vietnam.

Invitrogen Enters into a Licensing Agreement with IMBcom.

Stem Cell Sciences Enters into an Agreement with Myelin Repair Foundation.

European Company NovaSecta Joins First Chinese CRO Service Alliance for Drug Discovery Solutions.

DuPont (DD) Opens Fluoropolymer Production Plant in China.

Satyam Opens Center to Cater to Life Sciences Industry.

Eisai and Accenture Launch Clinical Data Management in India.

Sanofi Pasteur and Statens Serum Institute Team Up against Tuberculosis.

Roche Diagnostics and Mankind Pharma Collaborate on Accu-Chek Go.

Nicholas Unit Signs Drug Development Pact with Eli Lilly & Co.

Pierre Fabre and Nicholas Piramal Sign Oncology Research Agreement.

Fortis HealthWorld Works with Godrej Aadhaar to Reach Out to Rural Areas in India.

Karo Bio and Zydus Cadila Sign Research Agreement.

ICGEB Joins with Emory Vaccine Center.

DiscoveRx Corporation Signs Agreement with Cosmo Bio.

Sysmex and bioMérieux Form Commercial Joint Venture for the Japanese In Vitro Diagnostics Market.

Progeniq Launches Next-generation BioBoost v4.0 Accelerator.

Celltrion and CSL Announce Collaboration to Develop and Manufacture Monoclonal Antibody.

Antitope Ltd Announces Research Agreement with China Synthetic Rubber Corporation.

Merck and DCB Announce Cooperation to Create New Biotech Services and Training Center.

Taiwan's PharmaEssentia Signs Deal with Malaysia's Black Gold Global.

Teleost fishes share a duplication of their entire genomes. We report here on a computational survey of structured non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) in teleost genomes, focusing on the fate of fish-specific duplicates. As in other metazoan groups, we find evidence of a large number (11,543) of structured RNAs, most of which (~86%) are clade-specific or evolve so fast that their tetrapod homologs cannot be detected. In surprising contrast to protein-coding genes, the fish-specific genome duplication did not lead to a large number of paralogous ncRNAs: only 188 candidates, mostly microRNAs, appear in a larger copy number in teleosts than in tetrapods, suggesting that large-scale gene duplications do not play a major role in the expansion of the vertebrate ncRNA inventory.

In the last few years, the interactions among competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs) have been recognized as a key post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism in cell differentiation, tissue development, and disease. Notably, such sponge phenomena substracting active microRNAs from their silencing targets have been recognized as having a potential oncosuppressive, or oncogenic, role in several cancer types. Hence, the ability to predict sponges from the analysis of large expression data sets (e.g. from international cancer projects) has become an important data mining task in bioinformatics. We present a technique designed to mine sponge phenomena whose presence or absence may discriminate between healthy and unhealthy populations of samples in tumoral or normal expression data sets, thus providing lists of candidates potentially relevant in the pathology. With this aim, we search for pairs of elements acting as ceRNA for a given miRNA, namely, we aim at discovering miRNA-RNA pairs involved in phenomena which are clearly present in one population and almost absent in the other one. The results on tumoral expression data, concerning five different cancer types, confirmed the effectiveness of the approach in mining interesting knowledge. Indeed, 32 out of 33 miRNAs and 22 out of 25 protein-coding genes identified as top scoring in our analysis are corroborated by having been similarly associated with cancer processes in independent studies. In fact, the subset of miRNAs selected by the sponge analysis results in a significant enrichment of annotation for the KEGG32 pathway “microRNAs in cancer” when tested with the commonly used bioinformatic resource DAVID. Moreover, often the cancer datasets where our sponge analysis identified a miRNA as top scoring match the one reported already in the pertaining literature.

The deregulation of gene expression is found in virtually every malady afflicting humans. From cancer to HIV-1 the uncontrolled expression or loss of gene expression is prevalent. Clearly, the ability to specifically control transcription would prove exceedingly useful with regards to approaches to avert disease. It has been known for several years now that small antisense non-coding RNAs can induce transcriptional gene silencing in humans suggesting that a mechanism is operative whereby non-coding RNAs exert transcriptional control of gene expression. Only recently was it observed that long antisense non-coding RNAs function as the endogenous epigenetic regulators of transcription in human cells, thus explaining why small antisense RNAs were observed early on to modulate transcription. These observations present an interesting paradigm where it is now possible to either stably silence transcription by targeting small antisense non-coding RNAs to particular gene promoters, or modulate increases in transcription by targeting the degradation of the regulatory long antisense non-coding RNA. This review will highlight the mechanism of action whereby antisense non-coding RNAs modulate transcriptional gene silencing as well as discuss the realized potential to therapeutically regulate the expression of virtually any gene, i.e., turn it on or off as desired.

Many RNA functions are determined by their specific secondary and tertiary structures. These structures are folded by the canonical G::C and A::U base pairings as well as by the non-canonical G::U complementary bases. G::U base pairings in RNA secondary structures may induce structural asymmetries between the transcribed and non-transcribed strands in their corresponding DNA sequences. This is likely so because the corresponding C::A nucleotides of the complementary strand do not pair. As a consequence, the secondary structures that form from a genomic sequence depend on the strand transcribed. We explore this idea to investigate the size and significance of both global and local secondary structure formation differentials in several non-coding RNA families and mRNAs. We show that both thermodynamic stability of global RNA structures in the transcribed strand and RNA structure strand asymmetry are statistically stronger than that in randomized versions preserving the same di-nucleotide base composition and length, and is especially pronounced in microRNA precursors. We further show that a measure of local structural strand asymmetry within a fixed window size, as could be used in detecting and characterizing transcribed regions in a full genome scan, can be used to predict the transcribed strand across ncRNA families.

In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed. And almost all gene locations on the human genome sequence were identified. However, regulation of gene expression has been far from elucidated. Here, we report gene expression analysis of host genes, which include a non-coding RNA (ncRNA) gene in the intronic region. We consider that such an inclusiveness of genes is one of the regulatory ways of gene expression because expression of an intronic ncRNA gene can be controlled by expression of a protein-coding gene. Our results showed that gene expression levels of host genes tend to be higher than those of non-host genes. And host genes orthologous between human and mouse showed more conserved expression levels than non-host orthologous genes. These results indicate that the inclusiveness of genes should be analyzed to elucidate gene expression regulation of host genes.