Genetics & Molecular Biology

Epigenetics is everywhere. Nary a day goes by without some news story or press release telling us something it explains. Why does autism run in families?  Epigenetics.Why do you have trouble losing weight? Epigenetics.Why are vaccines dangerous? Epigenetics.Why is cancer so hard to fight? Epigenetics.Why a cure for cancer is around the corner? Epigenetics.Why your parenting choices might affect your great-grandchildren? Epigenetics. Epigenetics is used as shorthand in the popular press for any of a loosely connected set of phenomenon purported to result in…

A new claims the epigenetics of lactose intolerance may provide an approach to understanding schizophrenia - perhaps because both lactose intolerance and schizophrenia are inherited and neither condition emerges in the first years of life and in a booming fad like epigenetics, that is all you need.  More than 65 per cent of adults worldwide are lactose intolerant and cannot process the milk sugar lactose. Lactose intolerance is influenced by one gene, which determines if a person will lose the ability to process lactose over time. More specifically, those with some variants of this gene…

There have been increases in prevalence of food allergies over the past several decades but a debate over why; some fundraising groups and websites claim it is due to science changing food while some say it is simply better diagnosis and others say it could be a changing relationship between the presence of food-specific immunoglobulin E (IgE) -- a blood marker associated with food allergy -- in children's blood between the 1980s and the 2000s. A new study using 5,000 stored blood samples in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found no increase in the presence of IgE. As…

With the help of a small stool, Mercy Carrion clambers onto an examination table. The obese 50-year-old woman stands just 115.6 cm (3’9.5’’) tall. Despite being overweight, Mercy shows no sign of developing diabetes and has remarkably low blood pressure at 100/70. “That’s why they don’t care much about their weight,” says her doctor, Jaime Guevara-Aguirre. Mercy, who has a rare genetic disorder, is one of his long-term patients. She and her peers know they are in some way protected from diabetes, cancer and a number of other diseases that threaten the rest of us as we age. As such, they have…

Could organs explanted from other mammals save human lives someday? A new study shows that genetically modified pig hearts developed by US and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich researchers can survive for more than up to 2½ years when transplanted into baboons. Thousands of people in Germany alone are on waiting lists for transplant operations to replace an ailing vital organ. But the need vastly outstrips the available supply of organs such as heart, liver, lung or kidney. This explains why researchers all over the world have been exploring the possibility of resorting to…

The salivary gland secretes saliva that helps us chew and swallow the food we eat while the pancreas secretes digestive juices that enable our bodies to break down the fat, protein, and carbohydrates in the food. Secretions like these are important in countless activities that keep our bodies running day and night. A new study uncovers a previously mysterious process that makes these secretions possible - and it involves calcium, which is sure to set off a new supplement fad among the Dr. Oz, Mark Hyman, Joe Mercola sect.   Calcium is present in all of our cells and is a gatekeeper of…

Houston, we have a problem.  Well, you have a problem.  The Houston Museum of Natural Science (Twitter: @HMNS) is sponsoring an event that slams science, denigrates technology, and gifts its credibility to a non-scientific movement. HMNS is now an accessory to a disturbing trend.  Activist-inspired pseudo-scientific nonsense is creeping into legitimate scientific forums.  Reputable museums, conferences, and science centers are cleverly co-opted into hosting or sponsoring non-scientific events, typically as part of an otherwise scientific program.…

Houston, we have a problem.  Well, you have a problem.  The Houston Museum of Natural Science (Twitter: @HMNS) is sponsoring an event that slams science, denigrates technology, and lends its credibility to a non-scientific movement. HMNS is now an accessory to a disturbing trend.  Activist-inspired pseudoscientific nonsense is creeping into legitimate scientific forums.  Reputable museums, conferences, and science centers are cleverly co-opted into hosting or sponsoring non-scientific events, typically as part of an otherwise scientific program…

The substance that provides energy to many of the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers, according to an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which they describe a model of a biological computer that they have created that is able to process information very quickly and accurately using parallel networks in the same way that massive electronic super computers do. Except that the model bio supercomputer they have created is a whole lot smaller than current supercomputers, uses much less…

A study of mutant fruit flies discovered that homosexual behavior in groups can be altered by their environment. Specifically, they have shown that the sexual preferences of male fruit flies with a mutant version of a gene can vary depending on whether the flies are reared in groups or alone. The neurons that express the fruitless (fru) gene "basically govern the whole aspect of male sexual behavior," explains Tohoku University neurogenetics professor Daisuke Yamamoto. Normal male fruit flies tap the abdomen of a female to get a whiff of her sex pheromones before pursuing her to mate. In…