Articles by Sarah Bay (41 results)

Get to know the TAGC 2020 Keynote Speakers through our interview series. Caroline Dean has been a project leader at the John Innes Centre Norwich since 1988. Her work on seasonal timing mechanisms in plants has led into a detailed mechanistic analysis of the regulation of the floral repressor FLC in Arabidopsis. FLC transcription is…

A landmark paper published in GENETICS founded the field of genomic prediction before the requisite technology was available. When a new technology is developed, it can allow scientists to make great strides in addressing longstanding questions. Occasionally, however, researchers think so critically about a knowledge gap in their field that they’re able to propose a…

Study of huge Ancestry.com pedigree suggests assortative mating may have inflated previous estimates of life span heritability. Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously estimated, according to a new analysis published in GENETICS.  Ruby et al. used a data set of over 400 million…

An automated drug screening approach gives insight into rare NGLY1 deficiency. Sometimes, diagnosing and treating an illness is straightforward. Other times, the diagnosis is challenging while the treatment is simple—or vice versa. In the case of a rare disease like NGLY1 Deficiency, both diagnosis and treatment can feel unreachable. The complex challenges of rare diseases…

diploS/HIC uses machine learning to identify selective sweeps in unphased data. A set of footprints can tell us a lot about the creature that left them—without requiring us to see the creature itself. Footprints can suggest the animal’s size, weight, and stride, and from there, we can extrapolate even more information. Much like soft sand…

Identifying signatures of polygenic adaptation is getting easier—but a commentary calls for caution in drawing conclusions. If you’ve ever wished for a stepstool so you could see the stage at a crowded concert, or, conversely, if you’re tired of being asked “How’s the weather up there?”, you’ve likely pondered what makes some of us tall…

Over three centuries, as many as a million enslaved people were shipped to the Colombian port of Cartagena. From this hub of the slave trade, European colonists took Africans to labor in many places across the Americas, including the gold mines of the Chocó region. Today, people from Chocó often proudly identify as Afro-Colombian, while…

The unassuming fruit fly has paved the way for another big scientific win: on October 2nd, the Nobel Assembly awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young for their discoveries of the molecular mechanisms behind circadian rhythms. These biologists have spent their careers studying…

Over twenty years ago, somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) let scientists successfully clone the first mammal—Dolly the sheep. Despite advances since then, the efficiency of this process remains low. In the July issue of G3, Srirattana and St. John report a method to deplete cattle donor cells of mitochondrial DNA and efficiently generate blastocysts from…

As in real estate, so in cell biology: location is key. Knowing where a protein localizes in a cell gives insight into its function, and new research published in G3 describes a method to accurately identify a protein’s subcellular localization through high-throughput microscopy and machine learning. To determine a protein’s subcellular localization, researchers can tag…

Well over 15,000 years ago, a man and a bear died in a cave in the Jura Mountains in modern-day Switzerland. That was the end of the story for millennia—until their remains were discovered in 1954 by researchers investigating the cave. Further work in the 1990s uncovered the fact that the man had, in fact,…