Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous genetic variants associated with complex diseases, but mechanistic insights are impeded by a lack of understanding of how specific risk variants functionally contribute to the underlying pathogenesis. It has been proposed that cis-acting effects of non-coding risk variants on gene expression are a major factor for phenotypic variation of complex traits and disease susceptibility. Recent genome-scale epigenetic...
Tag Archives: risk
Commentary: KPLU’s proposed acquisition by KUOW puts a global online audience at risk
The clock is ticking in the campaign to save a beloved media institution based in the Seattle area. With 24-hour jazz and exclusive in-studio artist sessions (plus quirky promos and lively personalities), this unique combination of sounds ends if the non-profit “Save...
Schizophrenia risk from complex variation of complement component 4
Schizophrenia is a heritable brain illness with unknown pathogenic mechanisms. Schizophrenia’s strongest genetic association at a population level involves variation in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) locus, but the genes and molecular mechanisms accounting for this have been challenging to identify. Here we show that this association arises in part from many structurally diverse alleles of the complement component 4 (C4) genes. We found...
Bug in Magento puts millions of e-commerce sites at risk of takeover
Millions of online merchants are at risk of hijacking attacks made possible by a just-patched vulnerability in the Magento e-commerce platform.
The stored cross-site scripting (XSS) bug is present in virtually all versions of Magento Community Edition and Enterprise Edition prior to 1.9.2.3 and 1.14.2.3, respectively, according to researchers from Sucuri, the website security firm that discovered and privately reported the vulnerability. It allows attackers...
Substantial contribution of extrinsic risk factors to cancer development
Recent research has highlighted a strong correlation between tissue-specific cancer risk and the lifetime number of tissue-specific stem-cell divisions. Whether such correlation implies a high unavoidable intrinsic cancer risk has become a key public health debate with the dissemination of the ‘bad luck’ hypothesis. Here we provide evidence that intrinsic risk factors contribute only modestly (less than ~10–30% of lifetime risk) to cancer development....