huntingtin(rsrch)

= RESEARCH =

Research on Huntington's disease is currently being directed towards the function of huntingtin, how it is inherited, and potential cures for this disease. This year has been huge for advancements in the field of Genomics, which seems to have started it's upward trend of usefulness in 2005.New methods of genomic analysis continue to reveal secrets of the human genome, including it's function. HTT is understood to be expressed in many different ways in both juvenile and adult brains. The gene for huntingtin is large, and still has yet to be fully analyzed. Current research on the cures for this disease include RNAi therapy, An experimental RNA interference therapy that will be discussed further in the "Future Investigations" area of this wiki. I did some original research here on the phylogeny of huntingtin in an attempt to determine what animal models may be useful in testing for huntington's disease treatments based on relativity to human proteins. Using a Maximum likelihood tree of 19 organisms, coupled with a bootstrap analysis, I found the following results:

I have listed these results because they should be the most pertinent, however, they disagree with the other results I have gathered. The other results show a clear relationship between human, chimpanzee, mouse, rat, and dog. Unfortunately, I could not analyze the usefulness of //Drosophila melanogaster// due to an alignment issue inherent in the free version of Geneious, as well as an inability to read the the alignment properly with MEGA, the program used to create the trees. In the future, I hope the glitch will be fixed so I could provide better results. Blasting the protein revealed similarities which matched up with the trees other than the bootstrapped maximum likeliness.

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