Indian Journal of Human Genetics Medknow Publications on behalf of Indian Society of Human Genetics ISSN: 0971-6866 EISSN: 1998-362x Vol. 9, Num. 2, 2003, pp. 39

Advances in Genetics: A new direction and distinct medical voice

Dipika Mohanty

Editor, Indian Journal of Human Genetics

Code Number: hg03009

At its most recent meeting, the Editorial Board was pleased to note the steady increase in quality of manuscripts received and published. Much remains to be done, however to further increase the impact and distribution of the journal as well as to attract wide range of scientific and medical communities interested in various aspects of human genetics. Two major improvements have recently been made possible, thanks to the constructive support of our publisher Dr. D. K. Sahu of Medknow Publication. First recent developments of electronic communication has allowed us to make the articles available on line. In parallel we have used electronic mail to communicate with authors and reviewers in order to speed up the publication process. Secondly the appearance of the journal has been modified with a new internal design. We have given more space to comprehensive reviews. We hope these changes will improve the visibility of the journal and serve to distinguish it from other journals in this field. We believe that Genetics now is a major branch and as such deserves specific treatment. We hope that with our efforts, together with the active cooperation of the Editorial Board and Medknow Publication the journal will be more successful infulfilling the goal. The good news is that this journal has been indexed in CAB Abstracts, CAB Health, databases of Thomson Gale and EBSCO Publishing, IndMed and Indian Science Abstracts and is availalbe from Bioline International, Canada (www.bioline.org.br/hg). It is quite heartening for me to see the spectrum of articles in this issue covering molecular phylogenetic issues, molecular basis of some inherited disorder like deafness, polymorphism of vit D receptor gene to population genetics. It seems Medical Genetics is becoming more attractive field of research now. One of the article in this issue by E. Suleymanodlu entitled "Molecular phylogeneties and functional evolution of major RNA recognition domains of recently cloned and characterized autoimmune RNA-Binding particle" is a novel attempt in understanding the pathophysiology of auto immune disorders. Auto immune response targets a restricted set of autoantigens. Many of them are nucleic acids and proteins involved in the synthesis and processing of DNA or RNA. Heterogenous nuclear ribonucleoprotien (hnRNP) complexes are major constituents of the spliceosome. They are composed of 30 different proteins which can bind to nascent pre m-RNA. Among these hnRNP-A/B protein form a subgroup of highly related proteins consisting of two adjacent RNA binding domains (RBD) within the N-terminal parts,where as the c- terminal halves contain 50% glycine residues. These proteins in particular A₂/RA33 are targeted by autoantibodies. Since ribonucleoprotein is one of the most conserved widespread scaffolds, these authors have done the evolutionary analysis of these RNA binding domains with an idea of getting clue on disease-specific epitope. They have shown a sequence comparison of RNA-recognition regions of recently cloned human hn RNP A₃ with those of other relevant hnRNP A/B-type proteins (xenopus laevis hnRNPA₃ and FBRNP). They proposed that the overall folding pattern of these domains and the protein antigenicity arising from this is the determining factor to be differentially recognised by the autoantibodies. However, more mutational analysis combined with thermodynamic, kinetic, structural and evolutionary computation data is needed to understand the pathophysiology of a complex disorder like autoimmune disease.

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