Tag Archives: chromosomes

The shape of the genome influences genetics

Fission yeast genome……Credit: Wistar Institute It looks like a loose ball of yarn, as in the picture above. In fact, it’s the genome of a common yeast (S. pombe). The human genome spends most of its time in a ball something like this. The familiar “X” shaped chromosomes occur only at the time of cell [...]
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Cutting cancer cell immortality short

One of the characteristics of cancer cells is that they don’t die of old age. In a sense, they’re immortal – though of course they can be killed. The main reason for their longevity has been traced to telomeres a strip of non-coding genes at the ends of chromosomes. When normal cells replicate very often [...]
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Follow-up: Another ‘junk DNA’ study

The blog Science Life (University of Chicago Medical Center) has an excellent follow-up piece to the story about the discovery of non-coding DNA that contributes to heart disease (SciTechStory: More ‘junk DNA’ that actually does something) The Science Life post mentions that work and details another study done by the University of Chicago and the [...]
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Personalized monitoring of cancer recovery

Step by step the treatment of cancer becomes more personalized. The latest advance, in research from John’s Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA), uses a full-genome DNA sequence of a patient’s cancer to determine its ‘signature.’ Thereafter, in screens of blood tests, that signature – usually consisting of the more obvious chunks of rearranged DNA rather than [...]
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New study: Genetic variations associated with aging

Sometimes the shortest distance to new knowledge is a lot of repetitious work – like analyzing 500,000 genetic variations across the entire human genome. Researchers at King’s College London (UK), Leicester University (UK), and the University of Groningen (Netherlands) were on the trail of locating genes associated with aging. This is part of the (perhaps) [...]
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Mapping human genome variations

The mapping of the human genome was a monumental achievement; however, it was always intended to be just a starting point. Where has the follow-up work gone? One area is mapping of copy number variants. Normally our (non-sex) chromosomes come in twos (humans are said to be diploid), but the machinery of DNA reproduction relatively [...]
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