Articles by Caroline Seydel (18 results)

This article is part of a series of posts outlining the history and impact of research in experimental organisms. The series is developed in collaboration with the GSA Public Communications and Engagement Committee. By the time Bertrand Might was six months old, it was clear something was amiss. His muscles weren’t developing normally; he was…

Ever since Charles Darwin proposed the idea of natural selection in 1858, biologists have been pondering exactly how selection works, somehow driving the evolution from single-celled life to the wide array of complex vertebrates that now populate the planet. As advances in technology have enabled genomic mapping at increasingly finer resolution, the questions have only…

Harmit Malik loves conflict—genetic conflict, that is. “I’m really interested in this idea that components of the same genome, or components of different genomes, are constantly doing battle with each other,” says Malik, who heads a lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. To understand genetic conflict, Malik focuses on the parts of the…

Becoming the president of a world-class university isn’t something that typically happens “by accident,” but that’s exactly how Shirley Tilghman describes it. “I did not intend to be a university president,” Tilghman says. “I probably had the steepest learning curve of any university president ever.” In 2000, Tilghman was serving as founding director of the…

Aspergillus fumigatus isolated from clinical settings is resistant to agricultural fungicides. Infections have long been a deadly problem for hospital patients. Though modern medicine has an impressive array of antimicrobial drugs at its disposal, pathogens continue to evolve resistance, creating ever more dangerous infections as the microbial “arms race” escalates. Overprescribing of antibiotics is one…

Complex multicellular organisms have mastered the art of specialization; embryonic stem cells give rise to a multitude of different cell types that perform specific functions. Later, adult stem cells dedicated to specific tissues maintain and repair many organs in the body throughout life. Some specialized cell types, like skin, blood, lining of the intestine and…

Efforts to diversify an inbred population must take into account the genetic backgrounds of the founders. A female kākāpō named Rimu, whose parents are both Stewart Island founders.Photo by Jake Osborne. The nocturnal flightless parrot known as the kākāpō was once abundant throughout New Zealand. But after the introduction of mammalian predators, the species all…

Yeast screens explore the therapeutic potential of chemical rescue. Anyone who’s worked in a lab knows that sinking feeling of discovering that the temperature of an incubator, carefully set the night before, has crept up high enough to ruin the experiment. While such a mishap usually spells disaster, occasionally, it can lead to an unexpected…

Discovery of thiabendazole target explains vascular disrupting action. Even after hundreds of millions of years of evolution, some yeast genes persist mostly intact in humans and other vertebrates. Despite the huge differences between yeast and humans, these genes perform the same molecular function in both organisms but have been adapted over time into new contexts.…

New Bolotie method can handle the barrage of sequencing data that posed a problem for conventional recombination algorithms. Humanity has faced many pandemics throughout history, but never before have we tackled an active pandemic while so well equipped with genetic technology. In fact, when SARS-CoV-2 struck, the genetics community produced so much sequencing data so…

Sydney Brenner famously noted that progress in genetics “depends on the interplay between new techniques, new discoveries, and new ideas, probably in that order of decreasing importance.” In the 40 years since those words were recorded, new techniques have propelled the field of molecular biology to heights barely imagined at its inception. This year’s recipient…