The Human Dynasty

A “living fossil” tree species is helping a researcher understand how tropical forests responded to past climate change and how they may react to global warming in the future.

In the largest ever genetic study of male to female transsexuals, Australian researchers have found a significant genetic link between gender identity and a gene involved in testosterone action.

Biologists today are doing what Darwin thought impossible. They are studying the process of evolution not through fossils but directly, as it is happening. Now, by modeling the steps evolution takes to build, from scratch, an adaptive biochemical network, biophysicists have gone one step further. Instead of watching evolution in action, they show that they can predict its next best move.

Scientists led by Chris Tyler-Smith of the Genographic Research Project found differences on the Y chromosomes of more than six percent of the men living in areas around the Mediterranean once inhabited by Phoenicians. “The results are important because they show that the Phoenician settlement sites are marked by a genetic signature distinct from any [...]

[From the BBC]
Researchers estimate that as many as one in 17 men from the Mediterranean may have Phoenician ancestry – the sea-faring civilisation which dominated the Mediterranean thousands of years ago.

Medical researchers have unlocked part of the mystery underlying a childhood eye disease. New research shows how children with some types of glaucoma end up with missing or extra pieces of DNA.

Two proteins interact in a previously unknown molecular mechanism that may have broad implications in future studies looking for the causes of defective organs in fetuses, metastatic cancers and other diseases, according to new researcher, Reporting their work in Genes & Development, the researchers said the mechanism coordinates cell identity and behavior in the forming organs of embryos.

(Harvard Medical School) Researchers have developed a simple method for making a certain class of adult stem cells more therapeutically effective. By attaching a molecule called SLeX to the surface of human cells extracted from bone marrow, researchers have altered how the cells travel through vessels. This might enable the cells to more effectively reach sites of injury and replace damaged tissue.

(University of Delaware) University of Delaware scientists, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Arizona and South Dakota State University, have identified unusual differences in the natural mechanisms that turn off, or “silence,” genes in corn. The discovery, which was made by comparing the impact of inactivating a gene that occurs in both corn and in the much-studied laboratory plant Arabidopsis, provides new insight into how one of the world’s most important crops protects itself from mutation-causing mobile DNA elements and viruses.

(Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres) Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung in Braunschweig, Germany. have achieved an important advance in better understanding metabolic pathways in bacteria. Using computer models, the “System and Synthetic Biology” working group, headed up by Vítor Martins dos Santos, calculated the genetic changes that are necessary for increasing the production of biosynthetics in the Pseudomonas putida bacteria. The well-known science magazine, PLoS Computational Biology published the results today.