Research news: Good news in our DNA--Defects you can fix with vitamins and minerals

The News:
Good News In Our DNA: Defects You Can Fix With Vitamins And Minerals
ScienceDaily (Jun. 3, 2008) — As the cost of sequencing a single human genome drops rapidly, with one company predicting a price of $100 per person in five years, soon the only reason not to look at your "personal genome" will be fear of what bad news lies in your genes.
University of California, Berkeley, scientists, however, have found a welcome reason to delve into your genetic heritage: to find the slight genetic flaws that can be fixed with remedies as simple as vitamin or mineral supplements.
"I'm looking for the good news in the human genome," said Jasper Rine, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology.
"Headlines for the last 20 years have really been about the triumph of biomedical research in finding disease genes, which is biologically interesting, genetically important and frightening to people who get this information," Rine said. "I became obsessed with trying to decide if there is some other class of information that will make people want to look at their genome sequence."
What Rine and colleagues found and report in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is that there are many genetic differences that make people's enzymes less efficient than normal, and that simple supplementation with vitamins can often restore some of these deficient enzymes to full working order. Read on...

The Research:
Read the research behind this story in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (click on Full Text PDF at top of right hand column)