Protein aggregates for water purification

Water pollution is the contamination of water bodies including lakes, rivers, oceans and it is a leading global risk factor for illness and death for people, plants and living organisms. A principal source of water pollution is industry, from which increasing amounts of toxic pollutants are released including heavy metals such as cobalt, lead and copper. Today various technologies for purifying contaminated water can be applied, a lot of them being typically expensive, ion specific and characterised by low efficiency. For these reason, the search of new biocompatible materials with increased capabilities is strongly needed.Protein aggregates have already revealed their potential as environm…

Meta-analysis of mismatch repair polymorphisms within the cogent consortium for colorectal cancer susceptibility

2013

In the last four years, Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have identified sixteen low-penetrance polymorphisms on fourteen different loci associated with colorectal cancer (CRC). Due to the low risks conferred by known common variants, most of the 35% broad-sense heritability estimated by twin studies remains unexplained. Recently our group performed a case-control study for eight Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in 4 CRC genes. The present investigation is a followup of that study. We have genotyped six SNPs that showed a positive association and carried out a meta-analysis based on eight additional studies comprising in total more than 8000 cases and 6000 controls. The estimate…