New research by Daniel Lindner, a research plant pathologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Center for Forest Mycology Research in Madison and colleague Andrew Minnis might help shed some light on the white-nose syndrome and the devastating effects its had on bat populations across the eastern United States. Minnis and Lindner analyzed the DNA of the fungus behind white-nose syndrome and found that…
Article Excerpt:Research published in the American Journal of Human Genetics shows that the mixing of different cultural groups in India occurred between 4,200 and 1,900 years ago but started to decline as people began marrying only within their social castes, a much more recent development. Still, this means modern-day Indians share connections to all the groups that intermarried in the distant past.…
Is Antarctica’s Lake Vostok a prehistoric aquarium populated by exotic fishes and crustaceans? A study now hints at the possibility. But the idea that the pitch-dark lake might host complex animals — as some media reports have suggested — is vastly premature, leading researchers warn. Nestled beneath a glacier 4,000 metres thick, Lake Vostok is the largest of hundreds of…
Christopher Carr, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences is working in collaboration with Gary Ruvkun at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Maria Zuber, the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and MIT’s vice president for research, to build a DNA sequencer that he hopes will one day be sent to Mars where it can analyze…
Last month Connor Levy was the first child to be born in the US using next-generation sequencing (NGS), a technique that uses computer software to scan and count DNA fragments to ensure the correct number of chromosomes are present and identify any defects within 16 hours. Other techniques for screening embryos do exist but these are extremely costly and are quite specific.…
Researchers push back the age of recoverable DNA, a major boon for the study of evolutionary history
Researchers have reconstructed an ancient genome that is 10 times as old as any retrieved so far, and they now say that DNA should be recoverable from animals that lived one million years ago. This would greatly extend biologists’ ability to understand the evolutionary past. The genome was that of a horse that lived about 700,000 years ago in what…