Molecular biologists at UC San Diego have unlocked the code that initiates transcription and regulates the activity of more than half of all human genes, an achievement that should provide scientists with a better understanding of how human genes are turned on and off. The discovery of this critical DNA sequence code—what molecular biologists term the “human Initiator”—is detailed in a…
Male pregnancy. A long, tube-shaped mouth with no teeth. A body covered with bony plates. These are the odd, quintessential features of seahorses, but why? Scientists dove into this question on Wednesday by publishing the first complete sequence of a seahorse genome. “We have discovered an array of changes in the genome, which helps to explain why the seahorse looks…
Blind animals have had their vision partially restored using a revolutionary DNA editing technique that scientists say could in future be applied to a range of devastating genetic diseases. The study is the first to demonstrate that a gene editing tool, called Crispr, can be used to replace faulty genes with working versions in the cells of adults – in…
A joint team of geneticists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, demonstrated that the emergence of mammary glands in placental mammals and marsupials results from recycling certain ‘architect’ genes. The latter, known as Hox genes, are responsible for coordinating the formation of the organs and limbs during the embryonic…
The same algorithms that personalize movie recommendations and extract topics from oceans of text could bring doctors closer to diagnosing, treating and preventing disease on the basis of an individual’s unique genetic profile. In a study to be published Monday, Nov. 7 in Nature Genetics, researchers at Columbia and Princeton universities describe a new machine-learning algorithm for scanning massive genetic…
Scientists have devised a powerful new tool for understanding how DNA controls gene activity in cells. The tool allows researchers to map at high resolution, across large swaths of a cell’s genome, which DNA nucleotides work to regulate gene activity. “This is the first method that enables us to simultaneously test thousands of human DNA regulatory regions for their ability…