Genetics & Molecular Biology
We Can't Even Prove Secondhand Smoke Kills, Now A Study Says Particles Left Behind Will Damage Cells
Hank |
Smoking kills, there is no question on that, but as the smoking rate began to drop and the settlement with cigarette companies due to expire, trial lawyers turned to secondhand smoke as a new target. But they needed real evidence, not statistical correlation. Though asthmatics and people with respiratory issues suffer during any air quality change, from wildfires to heavy perfumes, the most authoritative study of secondhand smoke ever done couldn't document a greater risk of death.
Though the effort failed (you still shouldn't smoke around kids, for other reasons) that didn't prevent the…
Black-eyed peas, a global dietary staple for centuries due to their environmental toughness and nutritional qualities, are small beans with dark midsections. In sub-Saharan Africa they remain the number one source of protein in the human diet.
Now it's gotten its genome decoded, a problem almost as tough as the legume itself.
A genome is the full collection of genetic codes that determine characteristics like color, height, and predisposition to diseases. All genomes contain highly repetitive sequences of DNA that University of California Riverside Professor of Computer Science…
Fish, insects, crustaceans, and even some plants possess the ability to change the sex of their offspring before they are born.
It's a genetic skill mammals lack. Or did.
A new study reveals a genetic system in mammals that enables two animals to mate and produce only females. A similar system based on identical principles would produce only males.
This proof of concept is in mice - an instance where a mouse study is actually valid - but the real benefit is for agriculture, where farmers may want dairy cows and egg-laying chickens and not have to deal with random chance.
The…
Hank |
In modern American culture, two exploratory fields in science compete to scare the public or suggest the promise of miracle cures; epidemiology and studies in mice.
Statistical correlation is used to link anything to anything - food, chemicals, air quality, cell phones, they can all be implicated in some human disease if there are enough rows and columns and a scholar with an agenda. And if you don't try to find some new thing to link to poor health outcomes, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) under Dr. Linda Birnbaum is not going to give you funding, so it…
Our bodies can deploy biomolecules to find, tag and destroy invading pathogens. They work by binding to specific targets, called epitopes, on the surfaces of antigens - like locks to keys.
This selective tagging mechanism in natural antibodies has been valuable in engineering antibody-based probes that let them purify and study different types of proteins within cells. One technique, epitope tagging, involves fusing an epitope to a protein of interest and using fluorescently labeled antibodies to make those proteins visible - but only in fixed, dead cells.
Now epitope tagging is getting help…
More than 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, which means coffee beans used in all those lattes, espressos and mochas create a livelihood for millions of people worldwide.
Yet coffee plant production remains decidedly low-tech, and gimmick labels like "organic" and "fair trade" keep developing nations growing coffee stuck in the past. That has resulted in a "biennial effect" in yields, where years with high yields are often followed by years with low yields. The biennial effect makes it challenging for coffee breeders to compare yields from different varieties of coffee. Without…
Hank |
In today's Wall Street Journal my article Science Saves an Old Chestnut discusses the potential benefit of President Trump's executive order requiring USDA, FDA, and EPA to modernize when it comes to biotechnology approval. They have to consider actual risk instead of treating every product like a new invention. They don't make flowers go through tens of millions of dollars and 20 years of regulatory stonewalling, why do it for anything else?
First to benefit could be the American chestnut tree, which has a blight tolerant version ready to go, but how can an academic nonprofit…
A new exploratory study in mice found that the complement system, part of the innate immune system, plays a protective role to slow retinal degeneration in retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited eye disease.
Retinitis pigmentosa is an incurable and unpreventable blinding eye disease that affects 1 in 4,000 people but if "in mice" isn't caution enough, even more is warranted. Other studies have found that the complement system worsens retinal degeneration because it mediates some aspects of inflammation and worsens damage in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of…
Hank |
Researchers set out to find a wine grape so popular no one wanted to change it.
And they did, thanks to a genetic database of modern grapevines and 28 archaeological seeds from French sites dating back to the Iron Age. They discovered that Savagnin Blanc (not Sauvignon Blanc) from the Jura region of France was genetically identical to a seed excavated from a medieval site in Orléans.
That means the variety still grown now has grown for at least 900 years as cuttings from just one ancestral plant.
It had to be popular (and valuable) if later cuttings all derived from one prized…
Hank |
When you think "Hamilton" in 2019, you think $800 tickets to a Broadway show in Manhattan, and when you think Manhattan, you think urban wealthy elites and the denial of science that seems to go with it.
Not so for "Hamilton" producer Jeffrey Seller and Broadway photographer Josh Lehrer, who are instead funding efforts to use science to clone and plant 100 of the world's oldest and largest trees, called Champion Trees. Like California Redwoods.
Why? Perhaps they are worried about climate change and realize modern biology is a great way to mitigate CO2 emissions without telling poor…