Genetics

At one time, everyone knew what a gene was. It was one of those little beads on our chromosomes that determined whether we would be tall or short, fat or thin, smart or stupid. Or else didn’t, if we favoured the “environment” hypothesis. The trouble is, in the age of genome mapping, ENCODE, epigenetics, it’s all more fuzzy and more like real life at the same time. One friend suggested that “a gene is a functional unit of heritable information.” Perhaps it need not be a nucleotide. But for the term “gene” to be meaningful, the information must be in principle heritable, whatever the physical medium is. Meanwhile, there is Gerstein et al., “What is a gene, post-ENCODE? History and Read More ›

This is from a new study published in Nature Communications, and talked about at Phys.Org. Oh, how difficult it is these days to be an “intellectually fulfilled” neo-Darwinian: Humans don’t like being alone, and their genes are no different. Together we are stronger, and the two versions of a gene – one from each parent – need each other. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin have analysed the genetic makeup of several hundred people and decoded the genetic information on the two sets of chromosomes separately. In this relatively small group alone they found millions of different gene forms. The results also show that genetic mutations do not occur randomly in the two parental chromosome Read More ›