Tag: genes
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New genes! New inventions! So?! (Me!)
Thanks to the marine worm Platynereis dumerilii, an animal whose genes have evolved very slowly, scientists have shown that while haemoglobin appeared independently in several species, it actually descends from a single gene transmitted to all by their last common ancestor. (1) Things discovered. Only because they would anyway be. By someone else. In the…
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Genome. Life. Meaning.
Twenty years after the release of the human genome, the genetic 'blueprint' of human life, an international research team has now mapped the first draft sequence of the human proteome. (1) Genes mean nothing. Their expression through the proteome does. Proteome. But the proteome means nothing. Its manifestation through specific conditions is all that matters.…
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Genetics. The greatest farce?
DNA may not be life's instruction book -- just a jumbled list of ingredients: The common view of heredity is that all information passed down from one generation to the next is stored in an organism's DNA. But one researcher suggests this might not be so. In two new papers, he argues DNA is just…
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Genes. Not important.
One of the great puzzles of evolutional biology is what induced certain living creatures to abandon solitary existence in favor of living in collaborative societies, as seen in the case of ants and other social, colony-forming insects. A major characteristic of so-called eusocial species is the division of labor between queens that lay eggs and…
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Health. Disease. Blurry lines…
Our genome is made up of 20,000 genes, all of which may cause disease. At present, 4,141 genes have been identified as being responsible for genetic abnormalities, leaving around 16,000 genes with unknown implication in disease. Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, -- working in collaboration with scientists from Pakistan and the USA…
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