Genetics
Category archives for Genetics
Regenesis: Taking over biology using readily available materials from your kitchen
Posted by Greg Laden on December 3, 2012 
I might be exaggerating slightly about the ready availability of the materials… Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves by George Church and Ed Regis looks like a futurist tome on what could happen when technology finally catches up with human imagination and everything changes. Except it isn’t. Most futurists are people with…
Demonstration of the Double Helix
Posted by Greg Laden on April 24, 2012 This is a proof of concept blog post. Please give it a try and let me know if it works for you! Double Helix from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project by Sándor Kabai
The Genetics of Pesticide Resistant Bedbugs
Posted by Greg Laden on January 19, 2011 Bedbugs (Insects of the Cimicidae family, commonly Cimex lectularius) are annoying, might carry diseases (though this is unclear, so probably nothing importat1, and are apparently becoming more common in the US. Interestingly, there has been very little study done of their genetics. A new study just out in PLoS ONE looks at the bedbug genome…
What is the most important human adaptation?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 22, 2010 Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12 month gestation, and some…
Why didn’t Darwin discover Mendel’s laws?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 24, 2009 Perhaps we are all subject to falling into the trap of what I call the Hydraulic Theory of Everything. If you eat more you will be bigger, if you eat less you will be smaller. Emotional states are the continuously varying outcome of different levels of a set of hormones, forming “happy” or “stressy” or…
Evolutionary enamel loss linked to molecular decay of enamel-specific gene
Posted by Greg Laden on September 17, 2009 The evolutionary history of mammals can be reviewed as the evolutionary history of tooth loss. The early mammals had many teeth, and every now and then in evolutionary time, a tooth is lost wiht subsequent species arriving from that n-1 toothed form having that smaller number of teeth. With ver few exceptions, no mammals have…
The Three Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Natural Selection
Posted by Greg Laden on August 25, 2009 Natural Selection is the key creative force in evolution. Natural selection, together with specific histories of populations (species) and adaptations, is responsible for the design of organisms. Most people have some idea of what Natural Selection is. However, it is easy to make conceptual errors when thinking about this important force of nature. One way…
Falsehoods: Has evolution stopped for humans?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 21, 2009 In my initial
Happy Birthday Gregor Mendel
Posted by Greg Laden on July 20, 2009 Mendel was born on July 20th, 1822. He is famous for his discovery of peas and genetics. Here is his stuff translated into English.
BBC: DNA mutations followed by selection does not lead to new species!?!?
Posted by Greg Laden on June 24, 2009 In an BBC article describing a Royal Society paper on the rate of mutation in warm vs. cooler climates, the BBC made this statement: DNA can mutate and change imperceptibly every time a cell divides and makes a copy of itself. But when one of these mutations causes a change that is advantageous for the…
An important role for junk DNA????
Posted by Greg Laden on May 24, 2009 Junk DNA is like bigfoot. If a zoologist says something like “Hmmm… it would be cool to find bigfoot” all the other zoologists jump on him or her, drag the poor sap into the alleyway, toss on a blanket, and beat the scientist with rubber hoses until the movement stops. Same with junk DNA. If…
The Identification of the Two “Missing” Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis
Posted by Greg Laden on March 10, 2009 I first became acquainted with the Romanovs (as historical figures, not the actual Romanovs) reading in middle school about Russian History. Later, someone turned me on to Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra, which is quite a well known popular historical account of the last Czar of Russia and his family. Everyone knows the story of the…
A dead gene comes back to life in humans
Posted by Greg Laden on March 9, 2009 Why is there “junk DNA”? What is Junk DNA? What is a Pseudogene? What is Gene Duplication? Goodness, you certainly do have a lot of questions. And some of them can be answered, or at least addressed, on examination of a very interesting new paper recently published about a gene that became a useless “pseudogene”…
Evolution of the Lexicon
Posted by Greg Laden on March 7, 2009 I recently posted about the work by Pagel and colleagues regarding ancient lexicons. That work, recently revived in the press for whatever reasons such things happen, is the same project reported a while back in Nature. And, as I recall, I read that paper and promised to blog about it but did not get to…
Why didn’t Darwin discover Mendel’s laws?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 27, 2009 Perhaps we are all subject to falling into the trap of what I call the Hydraulic Theory of Everything. If you eat more you will be bigger, if you eat less you will be smaller. Emotional states are the continuously varying outcome of different levels of a set of hormones, forming “happy” or “stressy” or…
Mutation Patterns in the Human Genome are More Variable Than Expected
Posted by Greg Laden on February 5, 2009 I want to bring your attention to a somewhat dense and possibly inconclusive (but important) paper accompanied by a very informative overview in PLoS Biology, concerning mutations in the human genome. Mutation rates and patterns of mutation are important for a number of reasons. For one thing, the genome itself is a data set that…
When Kissing Cousins get to Third Base
Posted by Greg Laden on December 23, 2008 It has long been known that incest is not as bad as you think. Anti-cousin marriage laws are like prohibition laws and blue laws. They arise from a Christian conservative movement that swept Western Civilization from the late 18th century through the 19th century, up to about the time of the repeal of Prohibition. Sure,…
Researchers find DNA is transcribed by divergent polymerases
Posted by Greg Laden on December 8, 2008 The copying of DNA’s master instructions into messenger molecules of RNA, a process known as DNA transcription, has always been thought to be a unidirectional process whereby a copying machine starts and moves in one direction. But in work that represents a fundamental shift in scientists’ understanding of the phenomenon, MIT researchers have found evidence…
Allen’s Rule, Phenotypic Plasticity, and The Nature of Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on December 5, 2008 Allen’s Rule. One of those things you learn in graduate school along with Bergmann’s Rule and Cope’s Rule. It is all about body size. Cope’s Rule … which is a rule of thumb and not an absolute … says that over time the species in a given lineage tend to be larger and larger. Bergmann’s…
Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes
Posted by Greg Laden on November 29, 2008 Markita Landry, a half-Bolivian, half-French Canadian physics Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, … used a tango to convey her thesis, “Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes.” She is trying to understand how a protein called TelK bends DNA into hairpin loops. The mechanism makes for beautiful dance, with Landry bending like…
Can Evolution “Learn” From Past Environments?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2008 The paper I’m about to discuss is a minefield of potential misconceptions that arise from the way we often use language do describe natural phenomena. This is a situation where it would be easier to start with a disclaimer … a big giant obvious quotation mark … and then use the usual misleading, often anthropomorphic…
The Evolutionary Dynamics of the Lion Panthera leo Revealed by Host and Viral Population Genomics
Posted by Greg Laden on November 10, 2008 Cute baby lions. When they grow up, they will want to eat you. I’ll never forget the first wild lion I ever saw. It was a pitch black night, on the savanna in the Western Rift Valley. I had climbed on top of the hood of the Land Rover, engine off, but headlights on. My…
Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2008 There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years. By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the…
Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting
Posted by Greg Laden on October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like…
Figuring out DNA looping with unbelievably advanced technology
Posted by Greg Laden on September 29, 2008 An article just out in PLOS Biology explores one of the most important, but also difficult to observe, phenomena related to DNA regulation. Figure 1 from the paper: “Atomic Force Microscopy of Lac Repressor-DNA Complexes (A) Schematic structures of biotin (bio)- and digoxigenin (dig)-labeled DNA constructs with one (O-539 and O-349) or two (O-153-O and…
Effective Polygyny in Humans: Turns out it is for real
Posted by Greg Laden on September 29, 2008 Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation…
The Gene for Running Fast or Far
Posted by Greg Laden on August 23, 2008 Jamaican sprinters make people who are not really thinking about this jump, like pole vaulters, to the conclusion that there must be a gene for running fast that somehow evolved … like Olympic Beach Volley Ball seemingly from sterile sand … despite the numerous hurdles for such an event to happen. Such is the nature…
Yet Another PLoS Success Story, and some interesting stuff about sex and genes.
Posted by Greg Laden on August 13, 2008 From Sex, Genes and Evolution, a story of publishing in PLoS Open Access Journal: My lab has taken its initial journey on the PLoS ONE train. Yesterday, our paper entitled “An Expanded Inventory of Conserved Meiotic Genes Provides Evidence for Sex in Trichomonas vaginalis” was published in PLoS ONE. It’s a updated and detailed report…
Live blogging PZ Myers on Atheist Talk Radio
Posted by Greg Laden on July 27, 2008 PZ Myers‘ appearance on Atheist Talk Radio was positively Orwellian. Host Mike the Madman Haubrich actually asked PZ about developmental biology (evodevo). Fish embryos? What about crackers!!!! I wanted crackers!!!! And I get Zebrafish! The interview was actually very interesting, in which PZ discussed homologous structures in the mouse and the bat, in reference to…
The Evolution of Imprinting
Posted by Greg Laden on July 23, 2008 The phrase “genomic imprinting” has come to refer the turning off of a gene (a particular instance of a gene on a particular chromosome duplicated across the cells in a body) so that the gene is not expressed at all, with the turning off of the gene not caused in the body in question, but…
, which is now available for the 
