Allergy research continues to be one of the most active research fields. New studies show that that fullerenes may inhibit the allergic response
Human MC and peripheral blood basophils exhibited a significant inhibition of IgE dependent mediator release when preincubated with C60 fullerenes.
This is a German quote – frequently used in the context of alternative medicine – “who heals is right”. The history of this old quote is unclear; maybe it is a modification of the Latin “extra ecclesiam salus non est” – in todays English “the doctors always right” (or “might is right”?) Anyway it is a nonsense quote as (1) a healer wants success and not right (2) healing (at least on a few occasions) is no proof to be right.
So far in epidemiology case – control studies are defined by an approach where
… the past histories of patients (the cases) suffering from the condition of interest are compared to the past histories of persons (the controls) who do not have the condition of interest, but who otherwise resemble the cases in such particulars as age and sex ….
I usually explain controls as non-cases in the same overall environment (Show me more…)
I have written earlier about the hygiene hypothesis and my doubts that more or less “hygiene” influences the development of allergy (blog | paper). As we are further swamped with regular statements like (Show me more…)
That seems a usual phenomenon now: I am reading an interesting article (at Edge), want to know more about an author (Fitch) and end at a storming website at University of Tübingen (recording new German words). German linguistics seem to merge day after day with English linguistics.
Nature web focus today reports an overview of the four year project Encode (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) that tried to identify all functional elements in 1% of the human genome. In addition, there are 28 companion papers in the June 2007 issue of Genome Research. The Nature issue includes a pull-out poster featuring a screenshot of the UCSC Genome Browser.
I am still in the process of reading all the GWA studies, so don´t expect any intelligent remarks. The main point seems to be that the majority of the human genome is being transcribed which is in sharp contrast to the textbooks (Strachan/Read IInd ed, p142 says that only ~3% of the nuclear genome is being transcribed). Using gene centric SNP panels in some of the GWAs therefore have not been such a good idea, yea, yea.