Recently in ISG

UCLA ISG congratulates Dr. Wayne Grody for being awarded this year as a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS).

On Wednesday, November 28, 2018, the Biotechnology and Society Freshman Cluster course hosted Dr. Josiah Zayner as part of its DIY Biology Lecture series (co-hosted by the Institute for Society and Genetics and the UCLA Cluster Program).

Their goal is to uncover more information about how these animals move, eat, and what their genomes look like. Long hopes to detail how elephants without the benefit of tusks as tools may alter their behavior to get access to nutrients.

In plain English, the federal government is proposing reclassifying transgender people’s legal sex back to the sex assigned at birth. And if that sex at birth was listed wrong or left unclear, the government wants to put people through genetic testing to ensure a sort of “gender purity,” as it were.

Venom poses a number of interesting questions, such as “Where do the heads go when Venom eats them?” Leaving the theater on Saturday, however, one thought in particular stuck with me: “What would happen if you crammed Venom in an e-cigarette and vaped it?”

And look at climate change: In 2014, unusually low temperatures in southern Texas, brought about by a countrywide polar vortex, killed green anole lizards that lacked genes for “cold hardiness,” explains Shane Campbell-Staton, the UCLA biologist who documented the die-off. The elimination of these lizards genetically reconfigured the Texas green-anole population.

The persistence of elephant poaching has prompted researchers to wonder whether elephants really needed their tusks, and whether they might not be better off if the tuskless trait were to spread more widely through the African population. 

Scientists interested in finding specific genes that influence the behavior of humans and animals have a new tool, thanks to a two-year research effort aimed at describing how to apply the latest techniques of molecular genomics to the study of complex behavior.

Wayne Grody notes that at-home DNA tests differ significantly from the much more comprehensive and scientifically rigorous genetic testing that is performed at UCLA’s genomics center. At the center, people undergo a comprehensive analysis and diagnostic interpretation of their entire protein-encoding genome.

Imagine a world in which mosquitoes choose blossoms over blood. Nice, right? There already exists a mosquito species called Wyeomyia smithii in which most of the bugs refuse blood meals in favor of sweet floral nectar. And new research is helping to explain the evolutionary genetics of the switch from blood sucker to flower fanatic. 

The silky anteater (Cyclopes didactylus) has previously been recognized to be a single species divided into several sub-species. But a new genetic analysis, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, suggests that this enigmatic mammal is not one species, but seven separate ones.

Google released a tool called DeepVariant that uses the latest AI techniques to build a more accurate picture of a person’s genome from sequencing data. DeepVariant helps turn high-throughput sequencing readouts into a picture of a full genome. It automatically identifies small insertion and deletion mutations and single-base-pair mutations in sequencing data.