genetics
grrlscientist | January 3, 2010tags: Cotton: Building a Better Plant, cotton, agriculture, genomics, fabrics, technology, streaming video
This is another beautifully written and produced video about plant research. The lucky plant? This time, it's cotton -- what jeans and t-shirts are made of! This video explores how modern cotton plants came to be, the 50 species of cotton, and how cotton genomic research can improve our lives.
Plant genome research is already revolutionizing the field of biology. Currently, scientists are unlocking the secrets of some of the most important plants in our lives, including corn, cotton…
grrlscientist | December 31, 2009tags: Corn: The Dynamic Genome, corn, agriculture, genomics, food science, technology, streaming video
This is a beautifully written and produced science video about corn: where it came from, what it originally looked like, the technology we are using to learn the functions of individual corn genes, and future directions for research into corn genetics.
Plant genome research is already revolutionizing the field of biology. Currently, scientists are unlocking the secrets of some of the most important plants in our lives, including corn, cotton and potatoes. Secrets of Plant Genomes: Revealed…
razib | December 31, 2009Carl Zimmer has a nice write up of the a new paper in Science which characterizes the nature of the cells which are manifest during devil facial tumor disease. The Tasmanian Devil Transcriptome Reveals Schwann Cell Origins of a Clonally Transmissible Cancer:
The Tasmanian devil, a marsupial carnivore, is endangered because of the emergence of a transmissible cancer known as devil facial tumor disease (DFTD). This fatal cancer is clonally derived and is an allograft transmitted between devils by biting. We performed a large-scale genetic analysis of DFTD with microsatellite genotyping, a…
razib | December 31, 2009The Properties of Adaptive Walks in Evolving Populations of Fungus:
The rarity of beneficial mutations has frustrated efforts to develop a quantitative theory of adaptation. Recent models of adaptive walks, the sequential substitution of beneficial mutations by selection, make two compelling predictions: adaptive walks should be short, and fitness increases should become exponentially smaller as successive mutations fix. We estimated the number and fitness effects of beneficial mutations in each of 118 replicate lineages of Aspergillus nidulans evolving for approximately 800 generations at…
razib | December 30, 2009Disease Gene Characterization through Large-Scale Co-Expression Analysis:
Celsius, the largest co-normalized microarray dataset of Affymetrix based gene expression, was used to calculate the correlation between all possible gene pairs on all platforms, and generate stored indexes in a web searchable format. The size of Celsius makes UGET a powerful gene characterization tool. Using a small seed list of known cartilage-selective genes, UGET extended the list of known genes by identifying 32 new highly cartilage-selective genes. Of these, 7 of 10 tested were validated by qPCR including the…
milhayser | December 29, 2009
Racists often cite IQ as a genetically determined trait, attempting to justify and promote their supremacist attitudes. Even if IQ tests do not favor specific cultural or educational standards, is intelligence coded in our genes, or related to the color of our skin? Greg Laden answers an emphatic "no," explaining that although intelligence may be heritable--that is, passed from generation to generation like a language--there is no evidence that it is specifically inherited, or genetically determined. On Gene Expression, Razib Khan parses data on African-American ancestry, revealing a…
pharyngula | December 28, 2009Rick Warren regularly scribbles up these cloying little messages he calls the Daily Hope — and rather than hope, they offer nothing but trite platitudes and unfounded certainty about a godly purpose that I find extremely discouraging. How can people find this lying tripe uplifting?
God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA recipe that created you. David praised God for this incredible personal attention to detail God gave in designing each of us: "You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me…
pharyngula | December 23, 2009
Perhaps your idea of the traditional holiday week involves lounging about with a full belly watching football — not me, though. I think if I did, I'd be eyeing those muscular fellows with thoughts of muscle biopsies and analyses of the frequency of α-actinin variants in their population vs. the population of national recliner inhabitants. I'm sure there's an interesting story there.
In case you're wondering what α-actinin is, it's a cytoskeletal protein that's important in anchoring and coordinating the thin filaments of actin that criss-cross throughout your cells. It's very important in…
razib | December 23, 2009I referenced a paper in PNAS yesterday, and I thought it might be good to actually point to it today. There's nothing that new in the paper. It confirms the finding that ~20% of the ancestry of African Americans is European, and, that African ancestry seems to be much more dominant when it comes to components of the genome presumably disproportionately contributed by females (2/3 of X chromosomes). In any case, the paper, Genome-wide patterns of population structure and admixture in West Africans and African Americans:
Quantifying patterns of population structure in Africans and African…
razib | December 22, 2009
Over at Genetic Future Dr. Daniel MacArthur points out some errors in deCODE's interpretation services. Dr. MacArthur presumably knows his maternity, though if the X chromosome results were correct one would guess that Dr. MacArthur is actually adopted and that his mother might be a Lumbee Indian.
But it makes me wonder how confused people are going to be due to problems with false results. In particular, as these technologies become very cheap many families with make recourse to them. Sometimes this will highlight "extrapair paternity events," but sometimes there will be errors and…
razib | December 22, 2009
A few days ago I pointed out that actors with visible Asian ancestry, such as Keanu Reeves, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Dean Cain, can play white characters, while those with visible African ancestry can not (I will leave it to debate whether you think Rashida Jones or Jennifer Beals are violations of that rule or not). On the other hand, it does seem that people with no visible African ancestry can identify as black American due to the norm of hypodescent. For example, consider Walter White, who identified as a black man despite his visible white European appearance. White used his ability to "…
milhayser | December 18, 2009
On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk raises her hackles at the sight of Monsanto, a company which over the last century has churned out artificial sweeteners, sulfuric acid, myriad plastics, herbicides such as DDT, the pernicious defoliant Agent Orange, bovine growth hormone, PCBs, and other chemical wonders. Since their first genetic modification of a plant cell in 1982, Monsanto has shifted increasingly to biotechnology, and now control 90% of the world's seed genetics. Balking against this growing monopoly on our food crops, Astyk advises "Seeds are powerful. Get some good ones, save them…
razib | December 17, 2009Apropos of my skepticism of Census projections of 2050 demographic balances, there's a new paper out on Argentina which is relevant. Here's Wikipedia on Argentina's self-conception:
As with other areas of new settlement such as Canada, Australia and the United States, Argentina is considered a country of immigrants. Most Argentines are descended from colonial-era settlers and of the 19th and 20th century immigrants from Europe, and 86.4% of Argentina's population self-identify as European descent. An estimated 8% of the population is mestizo, and a further 4% of Argentines were of Arab or…
edyong | December 16, 2009In science, we don't often get to talk about male repression, but a new discovery gives us just such a chance. It turns out that ovaries can only remain ovaries by constantly suppressing their ability to become male. Silence a single gene, and adult ovaries turn into testes. That adult tissues can be transformed in this way would be surprising enough, but doing so by changing a single gene is truly astonishing.
As embryos, our gonads aren't specific to either gender. Their default course is a female one, but they can be diverted through the action of a gene called SRY that sits on the Y…
razib | December 15, 2009That's probably the big takeaway of a new paper on the genetics of Asians, a set which includes South Asians, but in the new research mostly focuses on the people of East Asia. In a global context this work is important. The backstory is that there are disagreements about the exact process of the "Out of Africa" migration. Most researchers would agree that the vast majority, perhaps all, of the distinctive genetic content of the human species derives from a migration from the African continent between 50 and 100 thousand years ago (closer to the former date than the latter likely). Note that…
edyong | December 14, 2009The NERS poll of the year continues. Same rules as before: you vote for your favourite stories from this blog over the last year, in various fields of science.
We've had animal behaviour, palaeontology and medicine. Today, genetics. Click on the links to refresh your memory and make your pick below.
What is the difference between the human genome and a pair of headphones?
DNA sculpture and origami - a meeting of art and nanotechnology
How inbreeding killed off a line of kings
Genetic neoteny - how delayed genes separate human brains from chimps
The death and resurrection of IRGM - the…
edyong | December 11, 2009I've got a new story up in New Scientist about the discovery of a gene called p53 - the so-called guardian of the genome - in one of the simplest group of animals, the Placozoa.
A vital gene that defends us against cancer has been found in one of the simplest of animals - a flat, amoeba-like creature called a placozoan. The discovery shows that p53, sometimes described as the "guardian of the genome", has been around for over 1 billion years
Placozoans are so simple that it's hard to conceive of them as animals at all. They have no tissues or organs, no front or back, no left or right. They…
razib | December 9, 2009According to search engine traffic one of the most popular posts on this weblog has to do with the genetic background of Ashkenazi Jews. That is, those Jews whose ancestors derive from Central & Eastern Europe, and the overwhelming number of Jews in the United States. The genetic origins of this group are fraught with politics naturally. With the rise of biological science the characteristics of Jews were used as a way to differentiate them as a nation apart in more than a cultural and religious sense. After World War II other researchers attempted to show that Jews were not genetically…
razib | December 7, 2009
Well, I don't quite know about that, but that's the sort of take-away from a new paper in PLoS Biology which looks at the downsides of female attractiveness. A Cost of Sexual Attractiveness to High-Fitness Females:
Adaptive mate choice by females is an important component of sexual selection in many species. The evolutionary consequences of male mate preferences, however, have received relatively little study, especially in the context of sexual conflict, where males often harm their mates. Here, we describe a new and counterintuitive cost of sexual selection in species with both male mate…