Genetics & Molecular Biology

To get from one cell to a complex organism, cells have to divide, travel around the body and arrange intricate shapes and specialized tissues. The best way to understand these dynamic processes is to look at what happens in the first few hours of life in every part of an embryo. While this is possible with invertebrates with a few hundred cells, like worms, it was previously impossible to achieve for vertebrates. “Imagine following all inhabitants of a town over the course of one day using a telescope in space. This comes close to tracking the 10 thousands of cells that make up a vertebrate…

In the beginning... Osamu Shimomura of Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, MA, USA; Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, and Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, CA, USA were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and development of Green Florescent Protein from jellyfish, GFP. Let there be light Osamu Shimomura isolated GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which lives off the west coast of North America. GFP glows bright green under ultraviolet light. Divided the light from the darkness Martin Chalfie…

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to three scientists responsible for transforming a green-glowing jellyfish protein into a ubiquitous tool in molecular biology. Green fluorescent protein (or GFP in lab jargon) and its various colored relatives have made many previously impossible experiments cheap and easy, and you would be hard-pressed to find any molecular or cell biologists who have never used some variant of GFP. There is no denying the influence of GFP, but was its discovery Nobel-caliber? San Diego Beach Scene, Fluorescent E. coli on agar, Nathan Shaner, photography by Paul…

There's been some comment recently about pundit John Derbyshire's belief that Obama will try to shut down biology because it has validated racism. Needless to say, Derbyshire is full of it, and he has a poor grasp of what recent genetics has actually demonstrated regarding nature, nurture, and race. This deserves a much longer discussion, which, fortuitously, is on its way, since I've been meaning to discuss a recent talk on genetics and race at our department given by geneticist Lynn Jorde. The short version is this: Derbyshire claims that we can "Name any universal characteristic of human…

Scientists at the University of Leicester, where genetic 'fingerprinting' was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, say they are developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone’s surname from DNA alone. Research by Turi King has shown that, unsurprisingly, men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked even in today's multicultural world. The results of her research have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, epidemiology and the history of surnames. On Wednesday 8th October Dr King will present the key findings of her Ph…

Howard Berg is a physicist turned systems biologist, and he's been a systems biologist long before it was trendy to be one. He's one of the smartest systems biologists around, and a nice guy too (one who was nice enough to sit down for lunch next to an alone, confused, awkward grad student who I'm sure came off as a tremendously boring person...) Berg has devoted his career to understanding information processing in E. coli, and this week in PNAS he describes a physical model of how E. coli senses food in its environment. E. coli's major challenge is living life at low Reynolds Number (PDF):…

I am obsessed with CSI (excluding CSI Miami, David Caruso is just too smarmy). I simply can’t help it. I will watch an episode of CSI that I have already seen twice, just for the thrill of seeing the cases unfold. I even downloaded the entire first season of CSI and watched every single episode, back to back, without sleeping. I know that I am not alone. Shows like CSI have swept the nation due partly to its drama, but also to its science. The fact that a single hair, nail or swath of skin could yield a lead on a case is captivating. It is also true. Granted shows like CSI sensationalize…

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen, Germany, have reported the completion of the first genomes of wild strains of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana as part of the 1001 Genomes Project. The entire genomes of two individuals of this species, one from Ireland, the other from Japan, have now been compared in great detail. They were found to be astonishingly different from each other, as Detlef Weigel and his colleagues write in Genome Research. This study marks the starting point of the 1001 Genomes Project, in which a total of thousand and one…

The recent announcement that Sergey Brin, the multibillionair co-founder of Google, has discovered that he possesses a genetic mutation that predisposes him to a form of Parkinson's disease has resulted in multiple stories in the news on the "genetic basis" of Parkinson's and the candidate gene LRRK2. But what exactly is LRRK2? The fact that we now have names for so many of these genes signifies one of the true advances in modern medicine - the fact that we actually know the location, but not necessarily the function, of most genes in humans. But we often forget that these genes themselves…

A study in northern China indicates that genetically modified cotton, altered to express the insecticide Bt, not only reduces pest populations among those crops, but also reduces pests among other nearby crops that have not been modified with Bt. These findings could offer promising new ideas for controlling pests and maximizing crop yields in the future. Bt is an insecticide derived from the spores and toxic crystals of the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis, and has been sold commercially since 1960. It is considered non-toxic to humans, animals, fish, plants, micro-organisms, and most…