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.…
Currently, roughly 20 percent of humanity’s caloric intake comes from wheat. Agricultural strains, specialized for bread or pasta production, have been bred for high productivity and resistance to many agricultural pests. But over the past few years, one of those pests, a fungus called wheat stem rust, has evolved the ability to overcome wheat’s defenses. Dangerous strains of wheat stem…
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…
ISG faculty Dr. Christopher Kelty co-edits the scholarly magazine, LIMN, devoted to outlining contemporary problems. For this issue, featuring ISG faculty Dr. Hannah Landecker, the topic is Sentinel Devices. Description: The polar ice cap rapidly recedes; colonies of honeybees collapse in alarming numbers; androgynous fish are detected in rivers and streams. These reports not only describe recent events, but also function as…