Genetics & Molecular Biology

Mitochondria, the energy factories in most of our cells that convert the fat, carbohydrates, and protein we eat into a common energy currency used by our bodies, also set off molecular alarms when cells are exposed to stress or chemicals that can damage DNA, such as chemotherapy, according to a new study in Nature Metabolism. This basic research could one day lead to applied science, like cancer treatments that prevent tumors from becoming resistant to chemotherapy. Most of the DNA that a cell needs to function is found inside the cell’s nucleus, packaged in chromosomes and inherited from…

Biotechnology is the future of plant optimization, because ecology and people demand more sustainable food development, and that means embracing progress. A roadmap of the genes which drive plant architecture in maize will help, because plants grow throughout their entire life, controlled by a small structure at the tip of the plant’s shoots, known as the meristem. The meristem  is the control center for the maintenance of stem cells – which can be converted into any cell type – and for the creation of plant organs such as side shoots and leaves. The meristem is different in shape and…

"Many people have dogs. We have stem cells," says Cedars-Sinai Hospital lab manager Loren Ornelas-Menendez about why they will be working on Thanksgiving, hand-feeding a special formula to their charges and making sure they stay at just the right temperature. Like they do every day, 365 days a year. This is not just any lab, it houses stem cells derived from hundreds of healthy donors and patients, and a catalog of human ills, including diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Crohn's disease. The lab's main collection consists of induced pluripotent stem cells,…

In February, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a bombastic press release to announce its 2019 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility was going to to Sarath Gunatilake and Channa Jayasumana, anti-glyphosate protesters who claim a causal connection between glyphosate and chronic kidney disease. AAAS has long been a political body, its leadership has come solely from one political party for the last 35 years. and that means it is often going to pick and choose the science it accepts based on its political skew. But a whole lot of Democratic…

Though plant burgers like Beyond and Impossible have surged in popularity, they are still alternative versions of the real thing. Science has been consistently pushing toward real meat, but grown in a lab, which should defuse activist claims about the meat industry without forcing people to settle for substitutes. The challenges are doing so at a reasonable cost and having it feel like real meat.  Animal meat consists mostly of skeletal muscle (and fat tissue) which grow in long, thin fibers -- as can be seen in the grain of a steak or when shredding pork or chicken. Reproducing these…

A new review of other papers claims that unless women stopped drinking alcohol a year prior to conception they probably gave their kids future congenital heart disease. The authors are not kidding. And binge drinking was correlated to 52 percent higher birth defects for males.   The confounders are obvious, as they are for any exploratory paper: drinking was self-reported, congenital heart diseases are the most common birth defects, and the authors hand-selected studies that affirmed their hypothesis. Binge drinking is, of course, risky. A small examination of binge-drinking in…

Everyone is a mutant but some are prone to diverge more than others. The difference is largely based on two influences. One is the age of a child's parents. A child born to a father who is 35 years old will likely have more mutations than a sibling born to the same father at 25.  The second is that the effects of parental age on mutation rates differ considerably among families -- much more than had been previously appreciated. In one family, a child may have two additional mutations compared to a sibling born when their parents were ten years younger. Two siblings born ten years…

One thing that makes the science community spit its Fresca out its collective nose is the organic industry's claims to be more natural than conventional. Mutagenesis, where seeds are literally dunked in chemical and radiation baths in hopes to get a good mutation, is placed under the organic halo (along with 50 synthetic ingredients exempted because there is "no organic alternative") but if one gene is moved from a Pacific Salmon to an Atlantic salmon so the latter grows faster, it is Frankenfish to environmental lawyers.  Copper sulfate, which can be used as paint, is organic because it…

The ketogenic diet is a high fat, low carbohydrate diet that has become a health fad but it was originally posited as a benefit for people with epilepsy. A review of 10 years of data at Ann&Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago confirms that it doesn't help - with infants and kids under age 3 who have epilepsy due to a confirmed genetic abnormality. Generally, it is only in the last few years that epilepsy specialists began offering ketogenic diet to younger kids, and most studies in infants have only included babies with infantile spasms. The current report describes…

Ben&Jerry's is not going to roll out ice cream derived from geneticaly modified cells in a lab any time soon - their buying demographic hates science (although their parent conglomerate Unilever loves it) - but the public wants it now. Perfect Day Foods, named as such because legend goes that when cows listened to the Lou Reed song they expressed more milk (people are willing to believe, the British Columbia Dairy Association even had a “Music Makes More Milk” contest in 2012) but one thing separates myth from reality; revenue. Perfect Day test-marketed an ice cream product at $20 a pint…