Physical and transcription map in the region 14q24.3: identification of six novel transcripts

Detection of Association Features Based on Gene Eigenvalues and MRI Imaging Using Genetic Weighted Random Forest

In the studies of Alzheimer's disease (AD), jointly analyzing imaging data and genetic data provides an effective method to explore the potential biomarkers of AD. AD can be separated into healthy controls (HC), early mild cognitive impairment (EMCI), late mild cognitive impairment (LMCI) and AD. In the meantime, identifying the important biomarkers of AD progression, and analyzing these biomarkers in AD provide valuable insights into understanding the mechanism of AD. In this paper, we present a novel data fusion method and a genetic weighted random forest method to mine important features. Specifically, we amplify the difference among AD, LMCI, EMCI and HC by introducing eigenvalues calculated from the gene p-value matrix for feature fusion. Furthermore, we construct the genetic weighted random forest using the resulting fused features. Genetic evolution is used to increase the diversity among decision trees and the decision trees generated are weighted by weights. After training, the genetic weighted random forest is analyzed further to detect the significant fused features. The validation experiments highlight the performance and generalization of our proposed model. We analyze the biological significance of the results and identify some significant genes (CSMD1, CDH13, PTPRD, MACROD2 and WWOX). Furthermore, the calcium signaling pathway, arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy and the glutamatergic synapse pathway were identified. The investigational findings demonstrate that our proposed model presents an accurate and efficient approach to identifying significant biomarkers in AD.

Notch Signalling Under Maternal-to-Zygotic Transition

The development of all animal embryos is initially directed by the gene products supplied by their mothers. With the progression of embryogenesis, the embryo's genome is activated to command subsequent developments. This transition, which has been studied in many model animals, is referred to as the Maternal-to-Zygotic Transition (MZT). In many organisms, including flies, nematodes, and sea urchins, genes involved in Notch signaling are extensively influenced by the MZT. This signaling pathway is highly conserved across metazoans; moreover, it regulates various developmental processes. Notch signaling defects are commonly associated with various human diseases. The maternal contribution of its factors was first discovered in flies. Subsequently, several genes were identified from mutant embryos with a phenotype similar to Notch mutants only upon the removal of the maternal contributions. Studies on these maternal genes have revealed various novel steps in the cascade of Notch signal transduction. Among these genes, pecanex and almondex have been functionally characterized in recent studies. Therefore, in this review, we will focus on the roles of these two maternal genes in Notch signaling and discuss future research directions on its maternal function.

Current status of human chromosome 14

Over the past three decades, extensive genetic, physical, transcript, and sequence maps have assisted in the mapping of over 30 genetic diseases and in the identification of over 550 genes on human chromosome 14. Additional genetic disorders were assigned to chromosome 14 by studying either constitutional or acquired chromosome aberrations of affected subjects. Studies of benign and malignant tumours by karyotype analyses and by allelotyping with a panel of polymorphic genetic markers have further suggested the presence of several tumour suppressor loci on chromosome 14. The search for disease genes on human chromosome 14 has also been achieved by exploiting the human-mouse comparative maps. Research on uniparental disomy and on the search for imprinted genes has supported evidence of epigenetic inheritance as a result of imprinting on human chromosome 14. This review focuses on the current developments on human chromosome 14 with respect to genetic maps, physical maps, transcript maps, sequence maps, genes, diseases, mouse-human comparative maps, and imprinting.