ISG Co-Director, Eric Vilain, has published an OpEd piece titled “What should you do if your son says he’s a girl?” in today’s LA Times.
Biomedical research is often slow and incremental, but it can take a leap when someone uncovers a hidden connection. Today, one group of researchers is launching a crowdsourcing initiative to pave the way, by harnessing the efforts of lay volunteers who will scan papers for key terms to help create a powerful searchable database. This crowdsourcing curation campaign, dubbed Mark2Cure,…
UCLA scientists examining causes of human infertility have found that the cells that create eggs or sperm during the prenatal stage of development are vulnerable to damage, according to new research published today. The study by Amander Clark, of the UCLA Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, was published in the journal Cell. Clark…
According to a new study published online in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, the most recent common ancestor of all snakes was a nocturnal, stealth-hunting predator that had tiny hindlimbs with ankles and toes. The results strongly suggest that snakes originated on land, rather than in the seas, as the oldest snake fossils currently known – Coniophis, Najash, and Dinilysia – are…
When birds got their wings, they lost the clawed fingers wielded by their dinosaur relatives. But they evolved a new “finger”—in their face. And what a boon that has been. Agile beaks of all shapes and sizes, from the gulping gape of a pelican to the needle nose of a hummingbird, have enabled the 10,000 avian species to thrive from…
The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project consortia, which includes scientists from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, have now published their results from their first pilot study in three Science papers. These finding will contribute to a better understanding of genomic variation and give us new clues about disease susceptibility. The GTEx resource is being developed in part to…