An excellent resource in the latest issue of Current Biology – seven reviews on the global genetic history of Homo sapiens, all available FREE. Not all the articles are easy going for the non-specialist, and lay readers might wish to focus on the introductory and concluding paragraphs, but this must surely be the most authoritative publicly [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Genetics’
20/01/2010
THE PANDA REVEALED
For many people, the giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleura, is synonymous with conservation. This gentle, bamboo-munching animal is down to around 2,500 individuals, and a combination of small population size and man-made environmental change, means that it is probably doomed to extinction in the wild. All is not gloom, however: the latest issue of Nature [subscription [...]
09/01/2010
HOW THE CAT GOT ITS COAT
Mammalian coat colour remains a mystery. Although we know a lot about the patterns involved, and can guess about some of their adaptive advantages, their genetic bases are largely unknown. Using a mixture of classic pedigree studies and molecular genetics, a new paper in Genetics (abstract only unless you have a subscription) has examined the [...]
21/11/2009
A PREDICTION ABOUT THE PINE MARTEN GENOME
The European pine marten (Martes martes) is a mustelid – part of the weasel family. There is also a North American relative (Martes americana). They mainly nocturnal and pretty hard to spot. Here’s a rather nice picture of a pine marten, from DJS photography (note its right ear, presumably nibbled in a fight): On the [...]
05/05/2009
WHY MOLECULAR GENETICS IS IMPORTANT
November 2007 Article from earlier in the year using mtDNA to track the number of whales being sold in markets in Korea They discovered that the number actually being consumed was far greater than the number that was officially reported. Uni/Athens needed to see full article.
23/04/2009
FLAME-HAIRED NEANDERTHALS
October 2007 Did Neanderthals have red hair? Some recent evidence to be published in Science points that way (you or your institution will need a subscription to get past the abstract). BBC summary.
22/04/2009
MYSTERIOUS ULTRA-CONSERVED DNA
September 2007 There are huge tracts (some up to 730 bp long) of the *non-coding* mammalian genome that are ultra-conserved over 80 million years, without a single base-pair change. We share these sequences with rats, cats and apes. When these were discovered in 2004, people assumed they must play a role in regulating some important developmental genes. Now someone [...]
21/04/2009
HOW HOX MADE FISH FINGERS
May 2007 Remember all that stuff about Hox genes in the first year? Well it IS important! A study from Chicago shows that a primitive fish, Polyodon, shows expression of Hox and Sonic hedegog (one of my favourite gene names) in a pattern similar to that seen in tetrapods. The authors interpret this in terms of the gradual evolution [...]
21/04/2009
MEASURING MINKE MORTALITY
May 2007 Molecular ecological techniques for estimating the number of Minke whales ”accidentally” caught that end up on Japanese dining tables. A magazine article from Nature (subscription needed to get past abstract).
20/04/2009
ONE GENE DOES IT ALL?
March 2007 Open Access article in PLoS Biology on the role of the vitellogenin gene on social organisation in honey bees, using RNAi to demonstrate its function at different stages
