DOHA: Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q) have successfully conducted the first fully Qatar-based study on the effects of smoking and aging on our genetic material.
The study, undertaken at WCMC-Q by Qatari PhD students Mashael Al Shafai and Wadha Al Muftah, confirmed that aging causes modifications to DNA and that smoking tobacco causes similar changes to our genes. Crucially, the project is the first study of its kind to be based on samples drawn entirely from an Arab population, as previous research in this area has generally focused on Caucasians.
Al Shafai and Al Muftah are both working at WCMC-Q through the Qatar Foundation Science Leadership Program (QSLP), a Qatar Foundation initiative that supports talented Qatari graduates to help them build careers in science and research. They carried out their groundbreaking research project with support from a team of graduate and senior scientists at WCMC-Q and Imperial College London. Entitled ‘Association of DNA methylation with age, gender and smoking in an Arab population’, the paper has been published in the highly regarded medical journal Clinical Epigenetics and marks a significant success for both QSLP and WCMC-Q. Epigenetics is the study of the epigenome, which consists of chemical compounds that influence the production of proteins by switching genes in the DNA on and off.
Support was provided to Al Shafai and Al Muftah by WCMC-Q researchers Dr. Shaza Zaghool, Senior Bioinformatics Data Specialist, and Dr. Pankaj Kumar, Research Associate in Physiology & Biophysics. The team was supervised by senior researchers Dr. Karsten Suhre, Director of the Bioinformatics Core at WCMC-Q, and Dr. Mario Falchi of the Department of Genomics of Common Disease at Imperial College, London.
The Peninsula
