Category Archives: Genetics

Book Review: Born Anxious

12 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Books, Development, Disease, Genetics, Humans

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I enjoyed Born Anxious more than I expected to but less than I hoped. Written by Daniel Keating, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, it synthesizes over a decade of research on how stress affects the course of our lives. Keating presents an interesting and convincing case that experiences early in life — or even in previous generations — can set biological switches that have wide-ranging consequences, affecting health, social well-being, and professional success. Continue reading →

DNA can survive atmosphere re-entry

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Astronomy, Evolution, Genetics

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747px-EntryOn March 29, 2011, a TEXUS-49 rocket took off from northern Sweden for a short trip into space and back through Earth’s sheltering blanket of atmosphere. This amazing feat of engineering has become surprisingly routine — we humans have gotten to the point where launching a vehicle into space to carry out an experiment or deliver a satellite into orbit no longer inspires awe and wonder. Sounding rockets are commonly used as sub-orbital research platforms. In this case, one of the experiments on the mission was a test of how well DNA molecules can survive the temperatures involved in plummeting back through Earth’s atmosphere. The results, published earlier this year in PLOS ONE, show that DNA is tough enough to make it through atmospheric re-entry after a quick jaunt in space. Continue reading →

The give-and-take between mothers and their offspring

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Development, Evolution, Genetics

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Image credit: Flickr user nekrumThis is a story about a gene which makes nursing mice produce more nutritious milk while also making their offspring less demanding. The gene serves to balance nutrient supply and demand between the mother and pup. If the gene is knocked out, the mother’s milk is less rich, but the pups are more demanding, evening out the impact. Things only go wrong when there’s a mismatch. If pups with a defective copy of the gene feed from a normal mother, their increased demand makes them grow larger than normal. Conversely, pups with a good copy end up smaller if they feed from a mother lacking a working copy, since her milk is less nutritious. Continue reading →

The Language of DNA

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Evolution, Genetics

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One of the striking things about the genetic code is the remarkable way it twists back on itself, combining redundancy and utility in a simple, elegant language. Many of us are introduced to the basic concept in school, but that introduction often leaves out the wrinkles — some of them newly discovered — which give the system its resilience and precision. Despite their complexity, most of these tricks are pretty easy to explain with linguistic analogies, which is precisely what I’m going to try in this post. Continue reading →

Controlling development by the numbers

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Development, Genetics, Vertebrates

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An embryo of the sea squirt Ciona. The nuclei of the 40 notochord cells are highlighted in red and the contours of a few notochord cells are defined by green fluorescent protein. All other visible nuclei are colored in blue. (Image Credit: Janice H. Imai and Anna Di Gregorio)Genes have to be carefully coordinated to switch on at just the right moment in development in order to make a mature, complex embryo out of just a single cell. Scientists working at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York have discovered how this coordination is accomplished. In a paper just published in PLOS Biology, they describe how the gene Brachyury controls the timing of a cascade of genes involved in a crucial process in vertebrate development. Continue reading →

The forgotten life of plants

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Genetics, Plants

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Peter Newell's illustraion of The Garden of Live Flowers (Image credit: Wikimedia commons)In Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice wanders into a garden with flowers that can talk — the “garden of Live Flowers”.  Of course, all plants are alive, but here the flowers are called “live” because they can talk.  One of the greatest examples of human arrogance might be our attitude towards plants.  We treat plants as objects, as part of the background, as mere things without any agency.  We tend to forget that they’re dynamic, complex living creatures that react and respond to their environment — just in unfamiliar ways and on a different timescale.  Continue reading →