Bipolar Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Bipolar, including details on bipolar disorder, symptoms, treatment, depression, medication.

Computational and experimental identification of novel human imprinted genes.

Luedi PP, Dietrich FS, Weidman JR, Bosko JM, Jirtle RL, Hartemink AJ

Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.

Imprinted genes are essential in embryonic development, and imprinting dysregulation contributes to human disease. We report two new human imprinted genes: KCNK9 is predominantly expressed in the brain, is a known oncogene, and may be involved in bipolar disorder and epilepsy, while DLGAP2 is a candidate bladder cancer tumor suppressor. Both genes lie on chromosome 8, not previously suspected to contain imprinted genes. We identified these genes, along with 154 others, based on the predictions of multiple classification algorithms using DNA sequence characteristics as features. Our findings demonstrate that DNA sequence characteristics, including recombination hot spots, are sufficient to accurately predict the imprinting status of individual genes in the human genome.

Published 7 December 2007 in Genome Res, 17(12): 1723-30.
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