It’s supposed to bind to the needle, but not to the hay. “Traditionally, researchers build a magnet that’s very good at fishing out the needle. “Basically, how do you detect a very rare mutation in a large pile of healthy DNA molecules? The needle you’re looking for might be a cancer-mutation DNA or bacterial-pathogen DNA, and the hay is healthy human DNA, maybe from blood. “We’re trying to solve the needle-in-a-haystack problem,” says David Zhang, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University. The ability to accurately find rare single-nucleotide mutations is becoming increasingly important as scientists drill down into genomes to find biomarkers for early cancer detection. Nucleotide variations are responsible for an individual’s characteristics, like eye color, but mutations can leave the body vulnerable to disease, or even be the root cause. The ability to accurately find mutations that are biomarkers for disease will help clinicians determine treatment paths for patients and may also help identify rare mutations and subtypes of infectious diseases as well as drug-resistant strains.Ī single-nucleotide variant occurs when one of the four basic components that make up DNA or RNA mutates. Published in the journal Nature Chemistry, the findings could be a significant step toward advancing personalized medicine. The proof-of-principle study located the variants with a high level of accuracy. Researchers applied new molecular tools to 44 DNA samples with known cancer-related, single-nucleotide variants. A new way to detect rare DNA mutations is hundreds of times more powerful than current methods.
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