Posts treating: "genetics"
Saturday, 24 September 2016
A few years ago stone tools were discovered in the Jurreru Valley region of Kurnool district, South India, in sediment stratigraphically below a volcanic ash layer dated to around seventy four thousand years ago. This was the deposit of the famous Toba eruption. Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist based at the University of Oxford, England, suggested that these tools were made by Homo
In 1865, Gregor Mendel, who first discovered the laws of genetics, read his first scientific paper to the Brünn Society for the study of Natural Sciences in Moravia (published 1866).
He described his investigations with pea plants. Although he sent 40 reprints of his article to prominent biologists throughout Europe, including Darwin, only one was interested enough to reply.
Most of
The genome of bacterium Helicobacter pylori found in the stomach of the 5300 year old European mummy named the "Iceman" shows close similarity with Helicobacter pylori strains found in the gut of north Indians. This finding published in Science has been used as evidence to support the Out of India theory, which proposes that the Aryans and the Indo-European language family originated in
From the ever eloquent Today In Science History:
Wright (Dec. 21, 1889 – March 3, 1988) was an American geneticist who was one of the founders of modern theoretical population genetics. He researched the effects of inbreeding and crossbreeding with guinea pigs, and later on the effects of gene action on inherited characteristics. He adopted statistical techniques to develop evolutionary
.. and I don't mean just culturally, but biologically as well.
Carl Zimmer in the New York Times summarizes recent results from a wide ranging study which incorporates the genetics of extant as well as ancient Europeans. The study found evidence for several instance of natural selection altering height, digestion, skin color and our immune system.
from the article:
Previous studies
What will happen to phytoplankton as the oceans warm, carbon dioxide levels rise, and nutrients become scarce? The answer matters to the oxygen we
A new technique successfully takes on a longstanding challenge in DNA sequencing – determining whether a particular genetic sequence comes from an individual's mother or father. The method, described in a Ludwig Cancer Research study in Nature Biotechnology, promises to accelerate studies of how genes contribute to disease, improve the process of matching donors with organs and help
Lorenzo Miodus-Santini an 11-year-old sixth-grader from Princeton, who was classified as autistic at only 13 months old, was never a big talker. As an infant he didn't babble or coo. When he was a toddler beginning to speak, he would learn one word but forget another.
His older brother, Christian, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, shared some similar characteristics – difficulty
Where did the first Americans come from? Most researchers agree that Paleoamericans moved across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia sometime before 15,000 years ago, suggesting roots in East Asia. But just where the source populations arose has long been a mystery.
Now comes a surprising twist, from the complete nuclear genome of a Siberian boy who died 24,000 years ago—the oldest
A study of the full genetic code of a common human virus offers a dramatic confirmation of the "out-of-Africa" pattern of human migration, which had previously been documented by anthropologists and studies of the human genome.
The virus under study, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), usually causes nothing more severe than cold sores around the mouth, says Curtis Brandt, a professor
Ants and bees are surprisingly more genetically related to each other than they are to social wasps such as yellow jackets and paper wasps, a team of University of California, Davis, scientists has discovered. The groundbreaking research is available online and will be published Oct. 21 in the print version of the journal Current Biology.
Using state-of-the-art genome sequencing
Insights into insect wing origin provided by functional analysis of vestigial in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum
Authors:
Courtney M. Clark-Hachtel, David M. Linz, and Yoshinori Tomoyasu
Abstract:
Despite accumulating efforts to unveil the origin of insect wings, it remains one of the principal mysteries in evolution. Currently, there are two prominent models regarding insect
As described in a patent recently granted by the United States Patent Office, consumer genomics company 23andMe has developed a system for helping prospective parents choose the traits of their offspring, from disease risk to hair color. Put another way, it’s a designer baby-making system.
The company says it does not intend to use the technology this way. “When we originally
The first sequenced tiger genome shows that big cats evolved to kill.
Genes for strong muscle fibers and for meat-eating appear narrowly shared, researchers reported, among species as distinct as the African lion and Asia's snow leopard.
Scientists mapped the genes of the endangered Siberian tiger (or Amur tiger), both to understand the genes that make big cat species distinct from
When Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953, it began a genetic revolution to map, study, and sequence the building blocks of living organisms.
DNA encodes the genetic material passed on from generation to generation. For the information encoded in the DNA to be made into the proteins and enzymes necessary for
Digit loss in archosaur evolution and the interplay between selection and constraints
Authors:
1. Merijn A. G. de Bakker (a)
2. Donald A. Fowler (a)
3. Kelly den Oude (a)
4. Esther M. Dondorp (a)
5. M. Carmen Garrido Navas (a)
6. Jaroslaw O. Horbanczuk (b)
7. Jean-Yves Sire (c)
8. Danuta Szczerbińska (d)
9. Michael K. Richardson (a)
Affiliations:
a. Department
Reconciling migration models to the Americas with the variation of North American native mitogenomes
Authors:
1. Alessandro Achilli (a)
2. Ugo A. Perego (b,c)
3. Hovirag Lancioni (a)
4. Anna Olivieri (b)
5. Francesca Gandini (b)
6. Baharak Hooshiar Kashani (b)
7. Vincenza Battaglia (b)
8. Viola Grugni (b)
9. Norman Angerhofer (c)
10. Mary P. Rogers (d)
11. Rene J. Herrera (e)
In a study published in Cell Research, Chinese scientists from Zhejiang University and BGI have completed the genome sequencing and analysis of the endangered Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis). This is the first published crocodilian genome, providing a good explanation of how terrestrial-style reptiles adapt to aquatic environments and temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD).
Scientists from Harvard Medical School and the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, provide evidence that modern-day India is the result of recent population mixture among divergent demographic groups.
The findings, published August 8 in the American Journal of Human Genetics, describe how India transformed from a country where mixture between
In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe's first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked