Genetics & Molecular Biology

Researchers have defined a previously unrecognized genetic cause for two types of birth defects found in newborn boys  "Cryptorchidism and hypospadias are among the most common birth defects but the causes are usually unknown," said Dr. Dolores Lamb, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Baylor and lead author of the report in Nature Medicine.  Cryptorchidism is characterized by the failure of descent of one or both testes into the scrotum during fetal development. In the adult man, the testes produce sperm and the male hormone, testosterone. Hypospadias is the…

The clinical promise of stem cells has been dampened by concerns that the immune system will reject the transplanted cells before they could render any long-term benefit. Previous research in mice has suggested that even adult stem cells produced from a subject's own tissue, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, can trigger an immune attack. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found that differentiating iPS cells in the laboratory to become more-specialized progeny cells before transplantation into mice allows them to be tolerated by the body's immune system. "…

How dare biologists create something not found in nature! Well, mankind has a lot of experience in trying to keep nature from killing us - the war between man and nature is a grudge match whose history and resentments run deep.  When scientists stop trying to keep nature from killing us is when we should worry. But in the First World idyll that anti-science environmentalists have manufactured about the ancient past (15 years ago, before genetic modification became common), all things that are unnatural are bad. Only natural is good. Ricin = good, for example, even though scientists know…

*** Professor Frederick L. Crane started his career as a botanist. He got a BS in Chemistry from the University of Michigan, Ann arbor in 1950 and received his PhD in 1953. Like many scientists of today, his next job was as a post-doctoral fellow and he went to work at at the Enzyme Institute of the University of Wisconsin, where he became an associate professor on his way to becoming a full professor at Purdue, where he now has Emeritus status. He has received the American Chemical Society Eli Lilly Medal for Biochemistry, he has worked for NATO, he even has an honorary medical degree from…

In the pop culture world of mainstream media, magic bullets are common. Every week there is a new miracle vegetable and then the following work there will be scare journalism about some chemical. In the world of magic bullets, smoking causes lung cancer. Yet science knows that a risk factor is not genetic determinism. If lung cancer among non-smokers were itemized separately from smokers, it would be in the top 10 killers all on its own, and shockingly few smokers get lung cancer compared to the hundred million who are smoking just in America. Cancer happens. But when an 18-year-old who…

A signal that promotes insulin secretion and reduces hyperglycemia in a type 2 diabetes animal model is enhanced by the inhibition of a novel enzyme discovered by researchers at NuChem Therapeutics of Montreal and the Montreal Diabetes Research Center. Insulin is an important hormone in our body that controls glucose and fat utilization. Insufficient insulin release by the beta-cells of the pancreas and interference with the action of insulin lead to type 2 diabetes. The secretion in the blood of insulin is dependent upon the utilization of glucose and fat by the beta-cells and the…

Individuals are more genetically similar to their spouses than they are to randomly selected individuals from the same population, claims a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is much different than sociological factors - it is no surprised that people tend to marry others who have similar characteristics, like religion, age, race, income and education.  The conclusion was derived based on an analysis of genomic data collected by the Health and Retirement Study. They found that people also are more likely to pick mates who have similar DNA. While…

Organisms inherit their mitochondria – the cell’s “power plants” – from their mothers, but what happens to all the father’s mitochondria? Why and how are paternal mitochondria prevented from getting passed on to their offspring after fertilization? Just the randomness of evolution or is there a reason the phenomenon has been conserved? One hypothesis holds that it is an active process in which paternal mitochondria are selectively degraded by a “self-eating” system known as autophagy, in which vesicles called autophagosomes engulf the cell’s unwanted structures. But the autophagy study was…

The ancient remains of a teenage girl, researchers call her Naia, found deep in the water of a Yucatán Peninsula cave have established a definitive link between the earliest and modern Native Americans, according to a new study in Science. So, yes, they really were here before you.  Ancient human remains in the Americas have been a puzzle for science because their skulls are narrower and have other measurably different features from those of modern Native Americans. Some researchers have hypothesized that these individuals came to the Americas from as far away as Australia, Southeast…

Photosynthesis is one of evolution's great success stories. Plants, algae and bacteria capture light energy from the sun and transform it into chemical energy. Can science improve it? Perhaps. While genetic modification is protested by anti-science groups, no one dislikes photosynthesis. And improving the photosynthetic rate is one strategy to improve plant productivity, which can be important for future food production.  Scientists have used synthetic biology approaches to demonstrate for the first time that micro-compartments made up of proteins originating in bacteria can be…