Reading Time: 2 minutes Two sets of MND genetic results were published yesterday. One of these results was about the importance of a new gene called NEK1. The second highlighted the role of gene C21orf2 in MND – we wrote an article about this yesterday. Both sets of results were published in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics. What are…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Today some exciting news about the genetics of MND was published in the scientific journal Nature Genetics. The results come in two research papers published in the same issue of the journal. This blog post discusses the results of the first of these papers for which King’s College London based Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi was one…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Huge congratulations to Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi for winning the prestigious Sheila Essey Award at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) research conference taking place in Vancouver, Canada. Professor Al-Chalabi is an MND Association funded researcher and Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics at King’s College London. He is also the Director of our MND Care and Research…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Janine Kirby is a Non-Clinical Reader in Neurogenetics and is celebrating 20 years in motor neurone disease (MND) research this month. Here she tells us more about how she got into the field, her current projects, what it’s like to work at Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) and to meet families affected by MND.…
Reading Time: 3 minutes A few days before Christmas, I hope that you’ll forgive the obvious pun. Rather than the small green vegetable that you either love or hate, here I’m talking sprouts of new shoots of talent shown by the winners of the poster prizes. They were chosen from over 300 poster presentations at the International Symposium on…
Reading Time: 3 minutes This autumn sees an exciting new development in the MND Association’s DNA Bank. Researchers can now use the samples within it to understand why motor neurones die as well as what the triggers are for MND. How the DNA Bank began Beginning in 2003 and running until 2012, approximately 1,500 people with MND, 1,000 healthy…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Dr Samantha Price is the Research Information Co-ordinator at the MND Association. As well as organising the ‘blog a day’ during MND Awareness Month she also communicates the latest news about MND research. Here she blogs about the MND Association’s announcement of the UK Whole Genome Sequencing project. It’s been a brilliant Awareness Month with…
Reading Time: 3 minutes We know that in the 5-10% of cases where there is a strong family history of MND, there is likely to be a genetic cause at work, acting like a weight to push the scales in favour of the disease occurring. These gene mutations are hidden somewhere within the 15 billion or so letters of…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Delegates to last weekend’s ENCALS (European Network for the Cure of ALS) meeting in Dublin were met with uncharacteristic hot and sunny weather – enjoyed by the numerous Stag and Hen parties wandering the city centre, but not by the 200 people ensconced in the impressive, new Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College, from 8am…
Reading Time: 2 minutes “Welcome to this afternoon’s genetics session, which I hope will convey elements of hope and excitement about the season of the gene” were Professor Teepu Siddique’s (from Northwestern University, USA) opening remarks on a series of talks that really did live up to this standard. To me each talk was like being read chapters of a thriller…
