“The white tiger, an elusive Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) variant with white fur and dark stripes, has fascinated humans for centuries ever since its discovery in the jungles of India. Many white tigers in captivity are inbred in order to maintain this autosomal recessive trait and consequently suffer some health problems, leading to the controversial speculation that the white…
Targeting expression of NRG1, which makes a protein important for brain development, may hold promise for treating at least some patients with the brain disorder. Like patients with schizophrenia, adult mice biogenetically-engineered to have higher NRG1 levels showed reduced activity of the brain messenger chemicals glutamate and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA). The mice also showed behaviors related to aspects of the…
The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s were the smartest of the smart, with mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within the top 1% of the population. Now, researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of…
An international team of genetic scientists has completed the genomic sequence of the Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii), a native of the high mountain steppes and semi-desert areas of the Tibetan plateau. The scientists have decoded the genome of Tibetan antelope and studied the underlying genetic mechanism of high-altitude adaptations (it can live at elevations of 2.5 – 3.1 miles). “The…
ISG professors Dr. Hannah Landecker and Dr. Aaron Panofsky have published a paper titled “From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology” in the Annual Review of Sociology. Abstract: Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated—how the activity of producing proteins is controlled. Although molecular epigenetic…
The use of genome-wide analysis (GWA), where the entirety of an individual’s DNA is examined to look for the genomic mutations or variants which can cause health problems is a massively useful technology for diagnosing disease. However, it can also pose major ethical problems if used incorrectly, say new recommendations from the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) published on…