Genetics & Molecular Biology
No matter where we are on the political spectrum, we all have the same underlying goals and behaviors: The pursuit of happiness, the American dream etc. This is, at the very least, the way psychologists had viewed political ideology for quite some time. However, new research may have identified the characteristics that lead us to lean ideologically to the left or right and it may be genetic.
New York University psychologist John Jost will present his research at the Association for Psychological Science’s 19th annual convention in Washington, DC, May 24-27th.
Jost states that current…
Long before animals with limbs (tetrapods) came onto the scene about 365 million years ago, fish already possessed the genes associated with helping to grow hands and feet (autopods) report University of Chicago researchers.
Paddlefish fins exhibit a unique pattern of Hox expression previously thought present only in the developing hands and feet of land vertebrates (tetrapods). This result supports the notion that fossil fish already possessed the genetic toolkit needed to evolve hands, feet, fingers and toes. Credit: University of Chicago Medical Center
This finding overturns a long-held…
The discovery of a flexible genetic coding in leaf-cutting ants sheds new light on how one of nature's ultimate self-organising species breeds optimum numbers of each worker type to ensure the smooth running of the colony.Research at the University of Leeds shows that despite an inherited genetic pre-disposition to grow into a particular worker caste, ant larvae can be triggered by environmental stimuli to switch development depending on colony's workforce needs.
"Our previous research suggested that genetics did indeed play a part in caste determination - but not how much of a part," says…
The discovery of a flexible genetic coding in leaf-cutting ants sheds new light on how one of nature's ultimate self-organising species breeds optimum numbers of each worker type to ensure the smooth running of the colony.
Research at the University of Leeds shows that despite an inherited genetic pre-disposition to grow into a particular worker caste, ant larvae can be triggered by environmental stimuli to switch development depending on colony's workforce needs.
"Our previous research suggested that genetics did indeed play a part in caste determination - but not how much of a part," says…
Heart researchers at the Center for Translational Medicine at Jefferson Medical College have used gene therapy to reverse heart failure in animals. In addition, they found that this gene therapy strategy had "unique and additive effects" to currently used, standard heart failure drugs called beta-blockers.
Reporting in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, researchers led by Walter J. Koch, Ph.D., director of the Center for Translational Medicine and the George Zallie and Family Laboratory for Cardiovascular Gene Therapy in the Department of Medicine at Jefferson Medical…
Hank |
Approximately 16 million Asian men consider themselves to be Genghis Khan’s descendants. It turns out that may actually be true.
Almost four years ago Zerijal and fellow researchers published a paper showing Y-chromosome variability of 2,123 inhabitants of different regions in Asia. They discovered a whole cluster of closely-related lines, all having a common ancestor.
Was Russian DNA the only thing he couldn't conquer?
They originated from Mongolia when Khan lived and its distribution coincided with the boundaries of his empire. Plus, let's face it, friends of Genghis Khan had plenty of…
About two months ago I was in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, attending the Keystone Symposium on Systems Biology and Regulatory Networks. I went hoping to hear about forward-looking research that deals with some of the most fundamental outstanding questions in biology - fundamental in the sense of being relevant not just to a particular cell type or organism, but to most cells, developmental systems, or biological systems in general.
I not sure whether I really got a glimpse of the future at this meeting, but I did get a good view of the present. Many of the speakers at this meeting are…
With the advent of more powerful and economical DNA sequencing technologies, gene discovery and characterization is transitioning from single-organism studies to revealing the potential biotechnology applications embedded in communities of microbial genomes, or metagenomes. The field of metagenomics is still in its infancy -- the equivalent of the early days of the California Gold Rush, with labs vying to stake their claim.
Amidst the prospecting, the call has been issued for methods to separate fool's gold from the real nuggets. Such a gold standard has now been provided through work led by…
After eight years and I am still learning new things my husband: we were walking down the street yesterday when the clouds parted, revealing a bright sun and he consequently sneezed! Now I realize that this phenomenon affects a significant number of other people I know. So in case you were ever wondering why looking at the sun on a bright day makes you sneeze here is the answer:
When a nerve cell is stimulated it passes on a chemical / electrical message to the next nerve cell in the chain. However, if it is a very strong message, this might also leak out and stimulate nearby nerve cells. So…
The identification of a cluster of essential genes on mouse chromosome 11 as well as similar clusters on the chromosomes of other organisms – including humans – buttresses the argument that there may be rules as to how genes are structured or laid out on chromosomes, said the Baylor College of Medicine senior author of a report that appears online today in the Public Library of Science Genetics, an open-access publication.
"There may be a real code to chromosomal organization," said Dr. Monica Justice, associate professor of molecular and human genetics at BCM and an expert in mouse genomics…