Genetics & Molecular Biology

This is not a story of Lost Tribes, but of lost history--the discovery of "Jewish genes" in Hispano Christian populations of the American Southwest. Jon Entine, author of Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chose People, reports. “Let us remember all of our Jewish brothers and sisters, who through their faithfulness to One God, inspired all Christians.” Resplendent in a red and white robe on a Palm Sunday Eve, Father William Sánchez solemnly marked what he calls the “Passover of Jesus,” the journey of the “King of the Jews” that begins with his entry into Jerusalem. While…

Oppressed people under attack in the War Against Smokers may have a new defender - science.  Smokers, unlike alcoholics, don't get much cultural sympathy. California even wants to boost taxes on cigarettes so it can give the money to other states.  That's right, if you smoke in California they will penalize you by helping researchers in North Carolina cure lung cancer.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tobacco use is the single most preventable cause of disease, disability, and death in the United States. They say smoking (and exposure to secondhand…

Stem cell research is very dynamic with research trends, focus, and approaches evolving rapidly - but increased government restrictions on the private sector have led to a steep decline in venture capital, which threatens to slow the pace of research and development.  New analysis from Frost&Sullivan, 'Strategic Analysis of the European Stem Cell Research Tools Market', finds that the market earned revenues of $148.4 million in 2011 and estimates this could reach $322 million in 2017. The segments covered include: bio-imaging and microscopy, cell biology tools, immunochemical,…

The ribosome is the cell's protein-building workbench and ribonucleic acids, the molecules we call RNA, are key tools perform a host of vital functions in cells.According to a new analysis, even before the ribosome's many working parts were recruited for protein synthesis, proteins also were on the scene and interacting with RNA. This finding challenges a hypothesis about the early evolution of life. The "RNA world" hypothesis first appeared in 1986 and posits that the first stages of molecular evolution involved RNA and not proteins, and that proteins (and DNA) emerged later, said University…

Skin cells, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), from heart failure patients have been reprogrammed to transform into healthy, new heart muscle cells that are capable of integrating with existing heart tissue, according to a new paper in the European Heart Journal.The research opens up the prospect of treating heart failure patients with their own induced pluripotent stem cells to repair their damaged hearts. As the reprogrammed cells would be derived from the patients themselves, this could avoid the problem of the patients' immune systems rejecting the cells as "foreign". Obviously…

Researchers writing in PNAS state they have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound, vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide, even generations earlier. The findings put a new twist on the notions of nature and nurture and may have implications for how certain behavioral tendencies might be inherited.  They exposed gestating female rats to vinclozolin and then put the rats' third generation of offspring through a variety of behavioral tests and found the descendant rats were more anxious, more sensitive to…

Anti-science hippies who invoke the precautionary principle to extremes (but only about their own causes) are not just an American cult phenomenon; Europe invented anti-science hysteria and the term Frankenfood. In the Philippines, the problems and hysterical claims are similar but the results have been better for science - though still not without disagreement.  We can forgive Philippine judges who don't understand biology and science when they want to act more cautiously but the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) there is not in the voting pocket of progressive…

Many proteins and other functional molecules in our bodies display a striking characteristic: They can exist in two distinct forms that are mirror images of each other, chirality or "handedness", like your right hand and left hand, and each of our bodies prefers only one of these molecular forms. Researchers have been exploring how and why chirality arises, and new findings on the physical origins of the phenomenon were published in Nature Communications.  "Objects like our hands are chiral, while objects like regular triangles are achiral, meaning they don't have a handedness…

The sexual maturation of female mice has been linked to longevity by researchers.  They had previously established that mouse strains with lower circulating levels of the hormone IGF1 at age six months live longer than other strains. In new work, scientists report that females from strains with lower IGF1 levels also reach sexual maturity at a significantly later age.  The researchers conclude that IGF1 may co-regulate female sexual maturation and longevity. They showed that mouse strains derived from wild populations carry specific gene variants that delay sexual maturation, and…

Are modern Jews a ‘race’—the descendants of an ancient tribal people, as Biblical lore has it? Or do they trace their ancestry to Eurasia as Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, and Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe, claim? The latest DNA research offers extraordinary insights into the origins of the Jewish people and its impact on each of us. I addressed this controversy a few years ago in my book, Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People. Now, Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New…