Tag Archives: DNA

Protein pathway competition regulates embryo development

One thing I’ve noticed in following scientific developments for a long time is that when something unexpected is discovered it very often adds to the complexity. Here’s a recent case in point, first, I’ll let a piece of the announcement speak for itself, and then I’ll explain the context: Until now, scientists believed these pathways operated [...]
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New study: Metagenomics gets a gut feel

I couldn’t resist the pun in the title of this post: Metagenomics gets a gut feel. The newly released study behind it, which is having considerable play in the media and on the internet, is the first genetic catalog of the microbes (bacteria, fungi, others) that make up the microbiome (ecosystem) of the human gut. [...]
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Found: Another molecule needed at the origin of life

Very often important science is constructed by a myriad of small advances in knowledge. This is almost certainly going to be true for answering one of the big questions in biology: “How did life on Earth originate?” It’s been known for a long time that it probably originated where there was a concentrated mixture of [...]
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Life on Mars, if it exists, is below the surface

Is there life on Mars? We don’t know yet. If there is, it isn’t very big. In fact, if there’s (still) any life at all, it will be bacteria or something even more primitive and small. Whatever there is, it’s also not likely to be on the surface. That’s not because of the cold; it’s [...]
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Can culture change the genome?

Almost from the beginning of our knowledge of genetics, it’s been asked, “Can the way we (humans) live change our genetics?” These days this is much the same as asking if culture can change the genome. It’s actually a relatively old question. The question got its biggest boost from one who is now a boogeyman for [...]
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Small RNA: New pathways for gene regulation?

Sometimes research discovers more than expected. (It could be called serendipity.) In this case, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin (Germany) were exploring the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which is a microscopic beasty that lives in the gut of about 50% of humanity. H. pylori, as it is abbreviated, has been linked to a [...]
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New medical paradigm: Growing human organs in animals

The ability to manipulate genetics cuts in a number of ways. This way may sound a little strange: Take a mouse; implant human liver cells in it; watch them grow into a mouse-sized but human liver. It’s more complicated than that, but it works. There are reasons to do this. A lot of tests for [...]
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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 [...]
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More ‘junk DNA’ that actually does something

This is not a screed, or it shouldn’t be. However, the next time you read something about ‘junk DNA’ – check its provenance. It’s true that for years researchers have looked at the huge tracts of genetic material that doesn’t appear to do anything vital (that is, coding for proteins) – which is about 98% [...]
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Disease linked genes have environmental factors too

Within the human body there are few diseases that aren’t influenced by some kind of environmental factors (stress, obesity, smoking, lack of sleep). Put another way, even diseases that have a genetic link (cancer, heart disease, diabetes) are not fully explained by genetics – environmental factors also play a role. Teasing apart the ‘who does [...]
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Follow-up: iGEM and BioBricks

Chet at his Science Musings blog has a good piece of satire on the story of iGEM 2010 (SciTechStory: iGEM: Proselytizing for synthetic biology). Here’s a sample: June 11, 2012. Hasbro-Mattel, the toy division of Monsanto Universal, today announced a product that will likely be found under many a Christmas tree later this year: The Little [...]
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Four-letter codons: A new synthetic biology playground

All life (that we know of) is built from the 4 nucleotides of DNA (Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine and in RNA Uracil instead of Thymine), which provide the code for creating 22 amino acids, which are then combined into proteins. An important part of the process is the reading of the DNA code by RNA [...]
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DNA for fun and nobody’s profit

Scientists in Scotland cloned a sheep. “Dolly” became very famous, but was rarely seen in public. There are rumors. It is said there was a mistake in the lab when they worked on the clone DNA. Somebody reversed a small portion of the DNA (probably a gene or two were backwards). Unfortunately, as a result [...]
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Plants, animals, and proteins between them

Horizontal movement of DNA (genes passing between species) is well-known and the basis of major research (and disagreement). Less known and much less researched is a similar sharing of proteins between species. Virtually unknown and probably under-researched is protein shared between plants and animals. New work by Wendy Peer at Purdue University (Indiana, USA) could [...]
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iGEM: Proselytizing for synthetic biology

What happens when genetic engineering goes viral? I’m using the word viral in its Internet sense. The New York Times has a fascinating article on the rise of synthetic biology and genetic engineering in the ranks of amateurs, mostly students, and under the guidance of an organization called iGEM. Here’s where “viral starts”… …synthetic biologists want [...]
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Waking the dead

Waking the dead. This was the actual title of a press release from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). What will the media of scientific weirdness make of this (not to mention the tabloids)? They’d make nothing of it; if they actually read the release. “Waking the dead” is a fanciful notion, something like a poet [...]
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New study and research tool: DNA mutations and molecular effects

Genetic mutations can cause diseases. That’s been known for many decades. However, there are tens of thousands of known mutations that can happen to the human genome. Not all of them cause diseases. Also, it’s known that mutations that have an impact on biological processes usually rearrange the amino acids that build proteins. However, the [...]
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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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There’s more to gene expression than biochemistry

At a guess, ninety-nine percent of biologists’ attention to DNA and gene expression is based on biochemistry. That’s good, since the biochemistry is obviously important and difficult enough to analyze. However, there is something else – it’s called physics. Cells, cell components, and DNA all exist in the physical world and therefore are also affected [...]
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Brain cancer genome sequenced

The cost of sequencing a human genome has come down, way down; and the value of doing it is going up. Here’s a very good example: scientists at the University of California Los Angeles (USA) recently completed the sequencing of the DNA from a type of brain cancer cell line, a glioblastoma known as U87. [...]
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