Articles tagged Chromosomes
(37 results)

Meiotic recombination in a commonly used laboratory mouse strain showed sensitivity to dietary changes. Recombination within the germline is a tightly controlled process. But new research suggests that nutrition may introduce some variability into this crucial step in genetic transmission, which could have implications for the design of future genetics studies. A study published in…

From a Kyoto garden to scientific discoveries.  Since the 17th century, medaka fish have been bred for their beautiful colors. Shortly after the 1900 re-discovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance, medaka began to be used for genetic studies. Recessive inheritance of the orange-red (b) and white (r) variants, female-limited appearance of the white phenotype, and an…

Failure of chromosomes to segregate properly results in severe medical conditions, or even death. Yet for a long time, it was challenging to study exactly how chromosomes carry out their complex choreography, due to a lack of robust tools for combining chromosome visualization and genetic experiments.  Douglas Koshland spent his postdoc studying mammalian chromosome biology…

After giving a talk in Seattle about chromosome pairing, Chao-ting (Ting) Wu boarded the redeye flight back to Boston and settled in to read a new research paper on an odd new discovery in the human genome. “It was so exciting, I had to get up and walk around on the plane,” she says. “I…

Don’t miss the eagerly-anticipated Larry Sandler Memorial Lecture in the Opening Session of the 62nd Annual Drosophila Research Conference! The Larry Sandler Memorial Lecture is presented by an outstanding recent PhD graduate on the opening night of the Conference. This year, the Larry Sandler Awardee is Ching-Ho Chang, who will present the following lecture based…

Written by members of the GSA Early Career Scientist Communication and Outreach Subcommittee: Carla Bautista Rodriguez, Université Laval; Zach Grochau-Wright, University of Arizona; Angel F. Cisneros Caballero, Université Laval Disrupting the complex and delicate balance of a genome can have devastating consequences. In humans, for example, extra copies of individual chromosomes can result in diseases,…

Guest post by Jennifer Tsang. Years ago, Sarah Edie and Norann Zaghloul pored over 50,000 zebrafish embryos, examining them for developmental phenotypes. They had previously injected each of these embryos with a plasmid expressing a gene from chromosome 21. Their goal was to understand how overexpression of specific genes on chromosome 21 affected early development1.…

Rapid genomic changes observed in Candida albicans soon after exposure to the oral cavity. Whether or not you treat your body like a temple, it presents a hostile and rapidly-changing environment for the many microorganisms that call you home. In contrast to the microbes that hang out inside humans, those that are cultured in the…

The Y chromosome has an unanticipated role in sex-biased intron retention in Drosophila. Differences between males and females in sexually dimorphic species stem in part from disparities in gene expression. This sex-biased expression can be achieved through numerous means, one of which is alternative splicing. In a recent study, Wang et al. investigated differences in one…

There’s no doubt that an extra copy of chromosome 21 is what causes Down syndrome. There’s a lot of doubt, however, over which particular gene—or combination of genes—on chromosome 21 is the actual cause of its symptoms. To flesh out our understanding, geneticists must grapple with this large chunk of the genome that includes more…

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that Job Dekker of the University of Massachusetts Medical School is the recipient of the 2018 Edward Novitski Prize. The award honors investigators who have exhibited “an extraordinary level of creativity and intellectual ingenuity in the solution of significant problems in genetics research.” Dekker, a…