Articles tagged Genetics Journal
(248 results)

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…

It’s surprisingly common for babies to be born missing one or both kidneys; an estimated one in one thousand babies are born with a single kidney. Called renal agenesis, this condition is fatal if both kidneys are missing, and having just one can also lead to serious health problems like hypertension and early renal failure.…

For many of the roughly 300 million people around the world with rare diseases, the road to diagnosis can be long, painful, expensive, and disheartening. Around eighty percent of very infrequently seen undiagnosed diseases are estimated to have a genetic basis, but even with modern DNA sequencing techniques, the causes are often unclear. In these…

There’s no such thing as an obese plant. But that doesn’t mean plants can’t teach us something about fat. In the September issue of GENETICS, Ducos et al. show that a protein that controls fat accumulation in humans has a similar function in Arabidopsis. They also find that the human and plant proteins may be…

Check out the September issue of GENETICS by looking at the highlights or the full table of contents! ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS MicroRNAs that contribute to coordinating the immune response in Drosophila melanogaster, pp. 163-178 Magda L. Atilano, Marcus Glittenberg, Annabel Monteiro, Richard R. Copley, and Petros Ligoxygakis Atilano et al. present a Drosophila post-infection survival screen that takes advantage of a library…

After surviving breast cancer, almost forty percent of female patients are affected by primary ovarian insufficiency (POI). This condition, in which ovaries don’t produce normal amounts of hormones or release eggs regularly, can result in health problems and an inability to have children. But POI isn’t caused by cancer itself—the actual culprit is DNA damage…

Even though domestic plants usually appear radically different from their wild relatives, they are often still able to interbreed. For transgenic crops carrying traits like herbicide resistance, this flexibility could pose a problem if they were to pollinate weedy relatives nearby. In the July issue of GENETICS, Adamczyk-Chauvat et al. examine the extent to which…

Genes involved in male reproduction tend to evolve rapidly. This has been observed in many different species and is thought to be due to sexual selection as males compete over mating opportunities. But in the August issue of GENETICS, Whittle and Extavour present results that flip this paradigm upside down. They find that in the…

In the 1940s, C. H. Waddington discovered a peculiar phenomenon in fruit flies: traits could appear in response to environmental stress in an individual’s lifetime and then be passed down to future generations. Waddington proposed that this wasn’t the inheritance of acquired traits, but actually due to pre-existing genetic variation that had no effect until…

Check out the August issue of GENETICS by looking at the highlights or the full table of contents! ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS Evolving Mistranslating tRNAs Through a Phenotypically Ambivalent Intermediate in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, pp. 1865–1879 M. D. Berg, K. S. Hoffman, J. Genereaux, S. Mian, R. S. Trussler, D. B. Haniford, P. O´Donoghue, and C. J. Brandl It is increasingly apparent that the…

Inheriting a trait from a grandparent doesn’t always involve their DNA sequences. In many organisms, some traits can be passed down for multiple generations via non-sequence based mechanisms, a phenomenon called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. The most familiar example is that human disease risk might be influenced by the lifestyle of a person’s grandparents. But by…