Without supplemental folic acid, their progeny have lethal neural tube and craniofacial birth defects. The mothers provided with large amounts of folic acid during pregnancy have progeny to develop normally. Given that folic acid can interact with environmental agents to influence birth defect outcomes, these studies demonstrate the importance of these genes in regulating environmentally induced birth defects. Neural tube and craniofacial defects with special emphasis on folate pathway genes. Inactivation of the folate binding protein genes disrupts neural tube closure.
Colon cancer is the second leading cause of death from cancer in the United States today.
Diet is thought to play an important role in its prevention and its occurrence. A number of important observations resulted from the series of experiments. There appears to be an interaction between DNA repair and apoptosis in that as apoptosis decreases, the expression of DNA repair enzyme increases. In addition, a different diet response to DNA damage was observed in the proximal versus the distal colon that may be important to the interpretation of site-specific colon cancers. Relationship between DNA adduct levels, repair enzyme and apoptosis as a function of DNA methylation by azoxymethane.