Recent News
- Found: Another molecule needed at the origin of life
- For real: A new way to produce electricity
- New: Single molecule sensor array
- Finally(?)…artificially making blood stem cells in quantity
- Update: Chinese space station
- Looking at the strange face of antimatter
- Life on Mars, if it exists, is below the surface
- A different kind of lens for time
- Oh please, “skinput”
- Update: More Moon water
- Cutting cancer cell immortality short
- First time: Watching the unfolding story of proteins in living cells
- Newly named: Copernicum (element 112)
- Making jet fuel from biomass
- Nanobubbles are really slick
Tag Archives: DNA
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 [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged biochemistry, ethidium, intercalator, oligonucleotides, organic compound, origin of life, paleochemistry, polymer, RNA Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged astrobiology, bacteria, environment, extremophiles, LUCA, Mars, microbes, panspermia, UV Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in Impact: Genetic Modification Also tagged biology, culture, EDAR, epigenetics, evolution, genes, genetic modification, genetics, genome, Lamarck, molecular biology, RNA 1 Comment
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 [...]
Posted in Impact: DNA Decoding Also tagged biochemistry, genetics, Helicobacter pylori, junk DNA, pathogen, RNA, sRNA, transcription Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in News: Synthetic Biology Also tagged genetics, Hepatitis-C, liver cells, microbiology, NBTC, synthetic biology Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Also tagged base pairs, chromosomes, genetics, heart cells, junk DNA, sequence Leave a comment
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% [...]
Posted in Impact: DNA Decoding Also tagged 9p21, coronary artery disease, genes, genetics, junk DNA, non-coding Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in News: Cell Biology Also tagged biochemistry, environmental factors, gene expression, genes, genetics, microbiology Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in News: Synthetic Biology Also tagged BioBricks, genetics, iGEM, synthetic biology Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in Impact: Proteomics Also tagged codons, genetics, microbiology, nucleotides, proteomics, RNA, transcription, tRNA Leave a comment
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 [...]
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 [...]
Posted in News: Proteomics Also tagged epigenetics, genes, genetics, plants, protein, proteomics Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in Impact: Synthetic Biology Also tagged BioBrick, genes, genetic engineering, GM, splicing, synthetic biology Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Also tagged genome, Greenland, Inuk, mammoth, sequencing Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Also tagged AAS, amino acids, computer modeling, mutations, proteins, statistical analysis Leave a comment
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) [...]
Posted in News: Extending Lifespan Also tagged aging, chromosomes, genetic, genome, gerontology, telomere, TERC Leave a comment
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 [...]
Posted in News: Cell Biology Also tagged biochemistry, biophysics, cells, gene, gene expression, lasers, mechanical stress, physics Leave a comment
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. [...]
Posted in News: Major Disease Cure Also tagged brain, cancer, GBM, genetic, genome, glioblastoma, U87 Leave a comment
Protein pathway competition regulates embryo development