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The microbiome: Our life in common with microorganisms
Fifth in a series of posts inspired by ten topics in ‘Insights of the Decade’ from the December 17, 2010 special issue of Science Magazine The topics are: Inflammation, climatology, tricks of light,...
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Hoogsteen base pairs: An alternate structure in DNA
Reverse Hoogsteen base pairing…..Wikipedia Commons I know some of my biases. One of them is knee-jerk skepticism about taking little-tested scientific results and blowing them up to “…a cure for...
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Oh Daphnia, why so many genes?
Ms. Water flea, Daphnia pulex…..credit: Wiki Commons This equal sign, =, is about as big the known champion of the gene-filled genome. Little Daphnia pulex, variously labeled a crustacean (like...
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Reprogramming cells: The post stem cell future?
Sixth in a series of posts inspired by ten topics in ‘Insights of the Decade’ from the December 17, 2010 special issue of Science Magazine The topics are: Inflammation, climatology, tricks of light,...
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Part of what makes us human may be what’s missing
Here’s one of those scientific questions that contains a highly suggestive fact: Why is it that the tiny water flea (Daphnia pulex) has a record 31,000 genes and the human – the infinitely more complex...
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Protein complexity could be our demise
Did you know that badly folded proteins could be the cause of our species’ destruction? Neither did I. I know about nuclear bombs, climate change, asteroid strike and even pandemic as possible doomsday...
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Human genetics: The mysterious unequal mutation by sex
By the numbers, geneticists thought about mutations like this: There are six billion pieces (nucleotides) of genetic information in the genome. Three billion provided by the mother and three billion...
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Epigenetic memory: Another path for genetic inheritance
As we have all been schooled, DNA determines what is inherited. If it isn’t encoded in the genes, it won’t be passed on. Except it is becoming ever more apparent this isn’t completely true. There is...
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lincRNA: A recently discovered RNA organizes stem cell differentiation
What makes a scientist’s heart go pitter-patter? Something like this: When the Broad team discovered more than 3,500 unique lincRNAs in the human and mouse genomes in 2009, “the potential was enormous,...
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Epigenetics ‘leaks’ into trans-generational inheritance
One of the bigger and most important ‘debates’ in biology – both now and in the past – is whether adaptations made for the environment of a single individual can be inherited by its offspring. This is...
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