Genetics

From ScienceDaily: “Surprisingly, we found that in many ways the gorilla Y chromosome is more similar to the human Y chromosome than either is to the chimpanzee Y chromosome,” said Kateryna Makova, the Francis R. and Helen M. Pentz Professor of Science at Penn State and one of two corresponding authors of the paper. “In regions of the chromosome where we can align all three species, the sequence similarity fits with what we know about the evolutionary relationships among the species — humans are more closely related to chimpanzees. However, the chimpanzee Y chromosome appears to have undergone more changes in the number of genes and contains a different amount of repetitive elements compared to the human or gorilla. Moreover, Read More ›

From Brian Boutwell and J.C. Barnes at the Boston Globe: Is crime genetic? Scientists don’t know because they’re afraid to ask … Ah, heritability. A term that is much maligned in disciplines like criminology and often serves as a wellspring of confusion. Well, in Carrie Buck’s case, it wasn’t exactly confusion, was it?: The vote was 8 to 1. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinion dispensed with young Carrie Buck’s physical integrity in five paragraphs, the six cruelest words of which characterized Virginia’s interest in preventing Buck from burdening the state with her defective offspring: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” More from Boutwell and Barnes: Most of the evidence about the causes of crime overlooks genetic transmission. Yet, some Read More ›

From the New York Times: DNA Under the Scope, and a Forensic Tool Under a Cloud Marina Stajic worked for nearly three decades as director of the forensic toxicology lab at the medical examiner’s office in New York City. Last week Dr.. Stajic, 66, filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming she had been forced into retirement last year in part because of a disagreement with her superiors over the accuracy of certain DNA tests. There is more at stake here than Dr. Stajic’s retirement. The cutting-edge technique at the center of this legal dispute, called low copy number DNA analysis, has transformed not just police work, but also a range of scientific fields including cancer biology, in vitro fertilization, Read More ›

So says conservation biologist Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Think about it. As you travel back in time though your family history, the number of ancestors you have roughly doubles with every generation. Using the most conservative estimate of generation time — 32 years — in the year 1152, you had as many as 134,217,728 potential ancestors. And since genes are scrambled with every generation, it’s very likely you share little to no genetic relation to most of them. They might as well be strangers!… DNA testing companies often take this ambiguity and fill in the blanks with impressive stories that you can show your friends and relatives. Though fascinating, these tales share more in common with astrological horoscopes than historical Read More ›

My previous post about information jumps, based on the example of the Prickle 1 protein, has generated a very interesting discussion, still ongoing. I add here some more thoughts about an aspect which has not been really analyzed in the first post, and which can probably contribute to the discussion. I will give here only a very quick summary of the basic issue, inviting all those interested to check my first post: Homologies, differences and information jumps and the following discussion, amounting at present at more than 500 posts. So: OK. This is more or less the essence of the first post. The following discussion has touched many aspects, but I will not mention them all here, because I am confident Read More ›

Ann Gauger on “de novo” genes at Evolution News & Views: De novo genes are genes that are present in a particular species or taxonomic group, and not present in any others. Why are they there and where did they come from? To answer these questions we have to first deal with some important assumptions of evolutionary biology. Sometimes called “orphan genes” because they have no parents we can identify. Because the field of research is still developing, different research groups use different criteria for deciding what counts as a TRG. For example, one recent estimate says that there are 634 genes that appear to have arisen de novo in the human genome, as compared with the chimpanzee and macaque Read More ›

From Sharon Begley at Stat News (“reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine”): ore than a decade after leading geneticists argued that race is not a true biological category, many studies continue to use it, harming scientific understanding and possibly patients, researchers argued in a provocative essay in Science on Thursday. “We thought that after the Human Genome Project, with [its leaders] saying it’s time to move beyond race as a biological marker, we would have done that,” said Michael Yudell, a professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and coauthor of the Science paper calling on journals and researchers to stop using race as a category in genetics studies. “Yet here we are, and Read More ›

Error found in study of first ancient African genome

“Finding that much of Africa has Eurasian ancestry was mistaken.” . . .

Read More ›

From The Scientist: Many patients with genetic variations linked to cardiac disorders do not exhibit any symptoms, raising concerns about the validity of incidental findings of genetic tests. … “Over the last decade, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of new genetic variations, largely single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that might serve as biomarkers for many common conditions,” Maine physician William Gregory Feero, an associate editor at JAMA, wrote in an accompanying editorial. “In general, these account for little in the variance of disease, and the predictive value of such SNPs has been largely disappointing.” More. See also: There’s a gene for that… or is there? Follow UD News at Twitter!

It’s all in our genes … From Brian Boutwell at Quillette: Why parenting may not matter and why most social science research is probably wrong Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes).3 Alternatively, non-biologically related adopted children (who have no genetic Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dr. Hollie Putnam, a National Science Foundation Ocean Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellow, is researching the mechanisms that corals use to respond to altered ocean conditions. Her work in the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa is revealing that some coral are responding to climate change by changing markings on their DNA to modify what the DNA produces. Like punctuation marks in an alphabet, this changes the result (proteins made) without altering the original letters (the DNA). Although this is a known phenomenon in many organisms, how coral use this to their advantage is largely a mystery. … The cauliflower coral, which was vulnerable to acidification, showed an increase in DNA methylation. This ability Read More ›

BA77 often posts clips of citations and links here at UD. After a recent noticeable break (we missed you), he has just [–> correction: he posted in a thread some time ago which just got a comment from TJG . . . ]  posted a link to a video on objections to prof Dawkins’ claims that FOXP 2 (let me be exact) etc trees give the same structure: Key clips include a transcript: Plus, several family trees, such as FOXP1, showing: With FOXP2: FOXP3: The three trees seem to be quite divergent, one putting chimps with squirrels and the like, another putting gorillas on a different branch, and only one putting the three on neighbouring twigs. This seems to be Read More ›

Let the door hit both of you on the way out? Well, how else to understand this, from a review of new book, The Society of Genes (Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher, Harvard U Press)? From New Scientist: FORTY years ago, Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene popularised the notion that the gene, rather than the individual, was the true unit of evolution. That view has dominated evolutionary genetics ever since. But in The Society of Genes, biologists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher say that it’s time to replace the selfish-gene metaphor with a new one that focuses on relationships. “We are not the simple sum of our genes,” they write. “The members of the society of genes do not Read More ›

From Atlantic: In one study, Stephen Kingsmore at the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe found that a quarter of mutations that have been linked to childhood genetic diseases are debatable. In some cases, the claims were based on papers that contained extremely weak evidence. In other cases, the claims were plain wrong: The mutations turned out to be common, like the one in Rehm’s anecdote, and couldn’t possibly cause rare diseases. Of course, people have gotten their kids aborted in the meantime … on the other hand, does that matter these days ? Daniel MacArthur at Massachusetts General Hospital found a similar trend in a study of over 60,000 people, the results of which have been uploaded Read More ›

The remarkable “powers” of evolution are now shown to degrade (aka “mutate”) the human genes essential to intelligence.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated, networks which they called M1 and M3.

Read More ›