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Feature
Priya Rajasethupathy: Memories mark DNA
Priya Rajasethupathy, 31Stanford | NeuroscienceGraduate school: Columbia09/22/2015 - 10:57 Neuroscience, Science & Society, Genetics, EpigeneticsView the video
Priya Rajasethupathy’s research has been called groundbreaking, compelling and beautifully executed. It’s also memorable.
Rajasethupathy, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, investigates how the brain remembers. Her work probes the molecular machinery that governs memories. Her...
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Mystery Solved
Bad Karma can ruin palm oil crops
Palm oil producers thought they had licked shortages of edible oil and biofuel in the 1980s, when they learned to make genetically identical copies of high oil-yielding palms. But when the cloned palms matured, some plants made shriveled fruits with very little oil. Exactly how these dry, “mantled” fruits spawned from twins of oil-gushing palms has been a mystery ever since.
Oil-barren...
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News
DNA tags mostly deleted in human germ cells
Mom and dad’s lifestyle may leave less of a mark on future generations than scientists have suspected.
In the first weeks after conception, some of the cells in human embryos get their genetic blueprints scrubbed clean, conclude three new studies published June 4 in Cell. Those cells, the ones that become sperm or eggs, could beget the tiny embryos’ future offspring.
The genetic...
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News
DNA disorganization linked to aging
Old cells do not go gently into that good night. In people who age prematurely, changes in the way that DNA is tightly packed in cells leads to mayhem that promotes the aging process, researchers have discovered.
Werner syndrome, a genetic disorder also known as adult progeria, leads to graying hair, cataracts, osteoporosis and other signs of aging in people in their 20s. Researchers...
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News
Catalog of DNA modifications produces surprises
A series of fine-tuned maps of DNA packaging in human cells reveal dynamic new views of how the genome’s instructions are carried out to build a person. The maps also offer surprising insights into what goes wrong in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer.
The maps and discoveries made after examining them are being published February 18 in more than 20 scientific papers in Nature and...
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News
Baby brains undergo dramatic changes in utero
The developing brain undergoes rapid and tightly coordinated changes in a molecular process known to help regulate gene activity, a new study shows.
Dramatic changes in DNA methylation, a process that usually quashes activity of nearby genes, occur during the first six months of brain development, researchers report February 3 in Genome Research. Geneticist Jonathan Mill of the...
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News
Gene activity change can produce cancer
Changing a gene’s activity can cause cancer, even though the DNA itself hasn’t mutated, a new study demonstrates.
The finding is some of the first direct evidence that epigenetic changes can cause cancer. Epigenetic modifications are chemical tags tacked onto DNA or associated proteins. Such tags alter gene activity without changing the information in genes.
Scientists have long...
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Science Ticker
Changes in kids’ genomes linked to chronic stress
Growing up in poverty or an unstable home is associated with shortened protective caps on the ends of children’s chromosomes, researchers report April 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Shorter chromosome caps, called telomeres, have been linked to increased risk of death.
In a study of 40 nine-year-old boys, kids from underprivileged backgrounds had telomeres that...
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Scicurious
Methylation turns a wannabe bumblebee into a queen
Bumblebees in an established hive live a high school rom-com social life. At the center table is the queen bee, surrounded by males that she created. On the outskirts sit the worker-bee nerds, all female, doomed to never get a date or form a hive of their own. But as in the movie Mean Girls, when the queen bee goes down, sometimes a worker has a chance to claw her way toward the throne. Which...
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Science Ticker
Chemical changes to genes make twins' pain differ
Genetically identical twins may not experience pain to the same extent because of differences in the way their genes have been chemically modified.
A study of identical twins and of unrelated individuals shows that differences in chemical changes to TRPA1, a gene that directs the production of a temperature-sensing protein, is connected to pain tolerance. The finding, with additional...