Genetics & Molecular Biology

The email was simple enough. It was a request from a member of the press asking “I would appreciate your reaction/comments to the recently published study on GMO corn for an article I am putting together on it. Deadline: Wednesday 4 January.” Just when I thought I was going to get a day off to myself to write up my own research results, in comes the dreaded time-sensitive press request for comments on a recently published paper. Dreaded because to respond properly means I need to sit down and read the whole paper and ensure I have understood the materials and methods, results, and discussion…

Vitamin D, which is produced by the body through exposure to sunshine, helps the body control calcium and phosphate levels, important for healthy bones. It can also be obtained from food sources such as fatty fish and egg yolks but it can be difficult to obtain enough vitamin D from food alone in countries with little sunlight so food is often fortified.  For the benefit of the never-ending supplement fad industry, some papers have linked vitamin D deficiency with a host of health problems including cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and now Vitamin…

Cancer cells are so deadly because of their ability to quickly invade and a new study contends that part of the blame rests with mitochondria, the energy factories of the cell. Mitochondria are organelles inside most of our cells that generate energy and so play a crucial role in a tumor's ability to generate the energy needed to invade healthy tissue. A regulator called NIK, a protein that regulates immune cell function and inflammation, is also present on mitochondria in brain, pancreatic and breast cancer cells. When the research team removed all NIK expression using CRISPR-Cas9 genome…

We've all felt sleepy after a big Thanksgiving meal and tryptophan usually gets the bad rap - but there simply isn't enough of it to make a difference. Yet clearly something is making many of us take longer naps after binging on supper. A recent study examined 'food comas' using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and explained some of the causes behind this phenomenon. They created a system that can measure both the sleep and feeding behaviors of individual fruit flies and discovered that, in much the same way as humans, the animals sleep for longer periods following larger meals.…

In a recent paper, of 81 overweight and obese women with type 2 diabetes who usually consumed diet beverages and were on a weight loss program, those who substituted water for diet beverages after their lunch for 24 weeks had a greater decrease in weight (-6.40 vs. -5.25 kg) and body mass index (-2.49 vs. -2.06 kg/m2) compared with those who continued to consume diet beverages. Specifically, the water group had a greater decrease in weight (water, −6.40 ± 2.42 kg; DBs, −5.25 ± 1.60 kg;  P = .006), in BMI (water, −2.49 ± 0.92 kg/m2; DBs, −2.06 ± 0.62 kg/m2; P = .006), in FPG (water, −1…

Cornell students want to "debate" GMOs tomorrow, and while finding anti-science activists is easy - Michael Hanson of Consumers Union will go anywhere to undermine food, that is why The Dr. Oz Show loves him, and they also got someone named Jonathan Latham of Independent Science News - what they couldn't find was a scientist. To an anonymous writer at Corporate Crime Reporter, a legal print newsletter, that was cause for concern, so they put out an article full of conspiracy tales designed to look like journalism - but was instead one long diatribe, likely by Latham. In the article, which was…

In recent years, the incidence of breast cancer has been increasing worldwide, and breast cancer is becoming a serious object of public concern. The onset of breast cancer is closely related to the sex hormone estrogen, and estrogen antagonists such as tamoxifen have been used as anti-breast cancer drugs. During pregnancy, the elevated blood estrogen level induces the proliferation of mammary epithelial cells, leading to the development of the mammary gland in preparation for lactation. The mammary epithelial cells eventually stop proliferation at late stages of pregnancy, impairment of…

Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016 "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy", the body's recycling system. Autophagy can rapidly provide fuel for energy and building blocks for renewal of cellular components, and is therefore essential for the cellular response to starvation and other types of stress.  Despite the bizarre claims of supernaturalists like Joe Mercola, D.O., or writers on Livestrong, the controlled digestion of damaged organelles within a cell are complex. Autophagy kills the…

Daniel Drucker's unofficial laboratory slogan is "I'd rather be third and right, than first and wrong." After 30 years, he has seen high-profile journal article after article proclaim the beginning of the end for diseases he studies like diabetes, gastrointestinal disease, and obesity, only for the findings to never be discussed again. It's not dishonesty or fraud, the problem is the irreproducibility of results which lends itself to invalidated materials, unreported negative data, and authors overgeneralizing their results, as Science 2.0 founder Hank Campbell noted in the Wall Street…

“Never put anything smaller than your elbow into your ear” is something we’ve been wisely cautioned against at some stage or another. But more of us are ignoring this advice. We use in-the-ear-headphones to listen to music, car keys and hair pins to scratch that particularly unpleasant itch, and hearing aids to enable better communication. Many of us also use disposable foam earplugs to protect from damaging noises in the workplace, or to block the noise of snoring partners, loud traffic outside bedroom windows, dogs barking and any other bothersome sounds that prevent a good night’s sleep.…