Category: Genetics

Scientists have finally figured out how those arches, loops and whorls formed on your fingertips. While in the womb, fingerprint-defining ridges expand outward in waves starting from three different points on each fingertip. The raised skin arises in a striped pattern thanks to interactions between three molecules that follow what’s known as a Turing pattern,…

Molecular biology’s flower child — Science News, January 6, 1973       During the past several years, some artificial genes have been synthesized…. But no one had unraveled a real gene that dictates the production of a protein. Now researchers … have done just that…. There is little doubt that sequencing of genes holds powerful ramifications for the…

WASHINGTON — Squid don’t have thermostats to control ocean temperatures. Instead, the cephalopods tweak RNA to adjust to frigid waters, a study suggests. Usually, genetic instructions encoded in DNA are faithfully copied into messenger RNA, or mRNA, and then into proteins. But squid and other soft-bodied cephalopods edit many of their mRNAs so that the…

In the battle against the invasive house mouse on islands, scientists are using the rodent’s own genes against it. With the right tweaks, introducing a few hundred genetically altered mice could drive an island’s invasive mouse population to extinction in about 25 years, researchers report in the Nov. 15 Proceedings of the National Academy of…

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the mercurial nature of the coronavirus has been on display. Some people get mild, cold-like illnesses or even have no symptoms when infected, while other people become severely ill and may die from COVID-19. What determines that fate is complicated and somewhat mysterious. Researchers are looking at a wide…

Food contaminated with fungi can be an inconvenience at best and life-threatening at worst. But new research shows that removing just one protein can leave some fungal toxins high and dry, and that’s potentially good news for food safety. Some fungi produce toxic chemicals called mycotoxins that not only spoil food such as grains but…

A genetic variant that appears to have boosted medieval Europeans’ ability to survive the Black Death centuries ago may contribute — albeit in a small way — to an inflammatory disease afflicting people today.  Researchers used DNA collected from centuries-old remains to discern the fingerprints that bubonic plague during the Black Death left on Europeans’…

DNA from a group of Neandertals who lived together and a couple of others who lived not far away has yielded the best genetic peek to date into the social worlds of these ancient hominids. As early as around 59,000 years ago, Neandertal communities in a mountainous part of Central Asia consisted of small groups…

The flurry of frizzy-hair e-mails began in 2016. Human geneticist Regina Betz of University Hospital Bonn in Germany and her team had just linked three genes to a rare disorder with eye-catching symptoms: silvery, spangly, spun glass hair that just will not lie flat. Called uncombable hair syndrome, patients can have dry, shiny strands that…

From pulling Mesopotamian war chariots to grinding grain in the Middle Ages, donkeys have carried civilization on their backs for centuries. DNA has now revealed just how ancient humans’ relationship with donkeys really is. The genetic instruction books of over 200 donkeys from countries around the world show that these beasts of burden were domesticated…