Indian Australian scientist edges closer to cure for genetic diseases
Sydney: Scientists are edging closer to a potential cure for debilitating genetic diseases like Huntington's disease, Friedreich's ataxia and Fragile X syndrome, thanks to a recent breakthrough led by an Indian Australian. The finding is the outcome of collaboration between a team led by Sureshkumar Balasubramanian of Queensland University School of Biological Sciences and Detlef Weigel at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany. Balasubramanian studies how different environmental conditions modulate developmental processes in plants. Specifically he aims to understand how plants respond to changes in temperature at a molecular mechanistic level. The study identifies an expansion of a repeat pattern in the DNA of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana that has striking parallels to the DNA repeat patterns observed in humans suffering from neuronal disorders such as Huntington's disease and Fredereich's ataxia. "It opens up a whole new array of possibi...