Genetics & Molecular Biology

Evolving Complexity Out Of 'junk DNA'

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to have solved this scientific riddle by analysing the genomics of primitive living fishes such as sharks and lampreys and their spineless relatives, such as the sea squirts. Verte ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 13 2008 - 9:31am

G-Protein-Coupled Receptors: Getting To The Roots Of Hereditary Hair Loss

A healthy individual loses around a hundred hairs a day. Nothing to worry about as long as they are constantly replaced and the losses occur evenly around the whole scalp. But when hair loss goes well beyond this level it can become quite a problem for tho ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 24 2008 - 2:28pm

Unravelled: The Genetic Coding Of The Pea

The pea is an important crop species but it is unsuited to the Agrobacterium-based genetic modification techniques that are commonly used to work with crops. Researchers have now discovered the first high-throughput forward and reverse genetics tool for th ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 25 2008 - 3:32pm

Plug-And-Play Inside Your Cells: Signals And Side Effects

If you've ever had a severe asthma attack or gone into premature labor, there is a good chance you were given the drug terbutaline. Terbutaline can relax your involuntary smooth muscle when it's causing problems: in constricted airways during an ...

Article - Michael White - Feb 24 2008 - 5:53pm

Maize, What You Call Corn, Gets A Working Draft Of Its Genome

The United States is the world's top corn grower, producing 44 percent of the global crop. In 2007, U.S. farmers produced a record 13.1 billion bushels of corn, an increase of nearly 25 percent over the previous year, according to the U.S. Department ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 25 2008 - 4:10pm

Why Heritability Matters In Mental Illness

Dr. Cynthia Bulik, William R. and Jeanne H. Jordan Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders at the University of North Carolina, spoke forcefully at yesterday's US Congressional Briefing organized by the Eating Disorders Coalition. Bulik gave a 20 ...

Article - Laura Collins - Mar 17 2008 - 9:10pm

Study: Happiness Is In The Genes

Happiness in life is as much down to having the right genetic mix as it is to personal circumstances according to a recent study. Psychologists at the University of Edinburgh working with researchers at Queensland Institute for Medical Research in Australi ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 4 2008 - 6:31pm

When will we get a Chevy Genome?

There's a class war brewing and it involves DNA. Only the wealthy can afford what is, now, around $350,000 for the kind of sequencing that can tell you if you have a disease-risk gene that can be passed on to kids. That's a Bentley. Dan Stoicescu ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - May 30 2011 - 7:25pm

Diminishing Returns From Genetic Association Studies

Genome-wide association studies are increasingly widely used to discover genetic variations that increase the risk of common diseases like heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Intuitively they're quite straightforward: take a few thousand individuals w ...

Article - Daniel MacArthur - Jun 29 2008 - 8:47pm

Using Our Genomes To Reconstruct Human Geography

If you had one hundred unlabeled DNA samples, taken from people all around the world, could you use that DNA to determine where the original donors came from? With major improvements in genotyping technology, geneticists are now getting better and better a ...

Article - Michael White - Mar 22 2008 - 8:56am