The human genome provides a precise, biological blueprint of life. To implement this blueprint correctly, the genome must be read with great precision, but it's impossible for this process to be completely error-free. Mistakes during transcription - random errors in how DNA sequences are copied for a gene to be expressed - can happen any time in any number of ways.
Energy continues to build for the role of the mitochondrion in health and disease, a field pioneered by Douglas Wallace, PhD, director of the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenomic Medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Buckle your seatbelts because this has been a busy week for research news at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. (It was also Teen Driver Safety Week, a topic we touched on with one of our blog posts earlier this week and in last week's In the News post.) Cancer research is hitting the accelerator with the release of the national Cancer
New research suggests that the tiny structures inside our cells that generate energy, called mitochondria, may play a role in our mind-body interactions and how we respond to stressful environments.
Mitochondria are not only the power plants of our cells; these tiny structures also play a central role in our physiology. Furthermore, by enabling flexible physiological responses to new environments, mitochondria have helped humans and other mammals to adapt and evolve throughout the history of life on earth.
Certain defects in the way the mitochondria work may lead to diabetes, and the ways our bodies adapt to high blood sugars share many features with the ways our bodies respond to mitochondrial disease.
