Inheritance in Biological News

100 reasons to change the way we think about genetics

... over 100 well-documented cases of epigenetic inheritance between generations of organisms, and suggests that non-DNA inheritance happens much more often than scientists ... suspected for years that some kind of epigenetic inheritance occurs at the cellular level. The different kinds ...

Why didn't Darwin discover Mendel's laws?

... Mendel solved the logic of inheritance in his monastery garden with no more technology ... variation is the last place where clean Mendelian inheritance can be seen," says Howard. "Darwin boxed himself in, unable to see the laws of inheritance in continuous variation, unable to see the real ...

CSHL scientists discover a new way in which epigenetic information is inherited

... offspring in fruit flies. A new mechanism of inheritance In a paper to be published on Nov 27th in ... a silencing response against transposons. inheritance via small RNAs Hannon likens this protection ... to be seen whether this mechanism of epigenetic inheritance is found in organisms besides fruit flies. "Small ...

New research suggests diabetes transmitted from parents to children

... of Lipid Research suggests an unusual form of inheritance may have a role in the rising rate of diabetes, ... just starting to understand additional kinds of inheritance like metabolic programming, which occurs when an ... but earlier research has shown that this kind of inheritance is at work in humans. For example, there is an ...

New test can detect both genetic and chromosomal abnormalities in embryos

... a news briefing: "Karyomapping is a universal method for analysing the inheritance of genetic defects in the preimplantation embryo without any prior patient ... development, which often delays patient treatment. For the first time, the inheritance of both single gene defects and chromosomal abnormalities can be detected ...

Redefining what it means to be a prion

... proteins in yeast and have further clarified the role prions play in the inheritance of both beneficial and detrimental traits. "The big debate in the field ... researchers view prions, from biological anomalies to mediators of trait inheritance and adaptations to fluctuating environments. work shifts the way ...

Biologists solve mystery of black wolves

... of Yellowstone represent an unparalleled population for studying the inheritance of traits," Wayne said. "In Yellowstone, we have followed very precisely the inheritance of coat color throughout the entire wolf population and document that coat ...

Egalitarian revolution in the Pleistocene?

... more surprisingly, under certain conditions (which include some cultural inheritance of social networks) a single alliance comprising all members of the group ... increase father-son social bonds or an increase in fidelity of cultural inheritance of social networks. Interestingly, the fact that mother-daughter social ...

Scientists clarify a mechanism of epigenetic inheritance

... Probing Epigenetics in Yeast We have not understood epigenetic inheritance very well, says Dr. Martienssen, a plant geneticist and one of the ... yeast organism is easy to study, in part because it lacks other epigenetic inheritance mechanisms, such as chemical modifications of DNA, that complicate the ...

Simple reason helps males evolve more quickly

... and director of UFs Graduate Program in Genetics and Genomics. The mode of inheritance in males involves simpler genetic architecture that does not include as ... of offspring. Relationships between gene expression and modes of inheritance have been addressed before, but this study analyzed an extremely large ...

Surprise in the organic orchard -- a healthier worm in the apple

... explains the leader of the research team. "This means of inheritance offers the quickest possible way for the insects to evolve resistance" ... for the future in response to this alarming result. In parallel with the inheritance studies, several new isolates of the codling moth granulovirus have been ...

Scientists discover gene mutation responsible for hereditary neuroendocrine tumor

... strong evidence that hSDH5 is the PGL2 gene. The seven individuals who inherited the mutation from their mothers are unaffected, suggesting an inheritance pattern that is specific to the parent of origin. The researchers also discovered that, as in yeast, the inactivation of hSDH5 dramatically ...

Further gene mutations linked to autism risk

... Pieces in the complex autism inheritance puzzle are emerging in the latest study from a research team including geneticists from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and The ...

First comprehensive guidelines for managing medullary thyroid carcinoma published in Thyroid journal

... University of Massachusetts Medical School, in Worcester. "This form of thyroid cancer is especially important because of its high mortality, strong inheritance patterns, and associations with other serious glandular disorders. These evidence-based guidelines will become a benchmark for patient management and ...

For cancer cells, genetics alone is poor indicator for drug response

... to do with genetics. "Genetics are permanently heritable, while these protein levels are temporarily heritable," says Sorger. "But this temporary inheritance can make all the difference in the world when it comes to the effectiveness of certain medications." These findings are published April 12 online ...

Mixed population provides insights into human genetic makeup

... genes that influence the shape of the human face and head, Shriver began with an online database of genes linked to disease -- Online Mendelian inheritance of Man. If the symptoms of the disease involved the face or skull the gene implicated in the disease became a candidate for those facial traits. ...

Eating eggs when pregnant affects breast cancer in offspring

... A stunning discovery based on epigenetics (the inheritance of propensities acquired in the womb) reveals that consuming cholinea nutrient found in eggs and other foodsduring pregnancy may significantly affect ...

Study identifies genetic variants giving rise to differences in metabolism

... and compared it to their genetic inheritance. The results suggest that most individuals carry one or more risk alleles in their genetic inheritance that may determine a certain medical phenotype, the response to a given drug treatment, or the reaction to a nutritional intervention or ...

Kidney function discovery sheds light on genetic complexity of disease

... to high blood pressure, kidney stones, deafness and problems in the brain. "Iminoglycinuria was observed to occur in families and the pattern of inheritance suggested that the cause might be due to an inherited abnormality of a specific pump on the surface of kidney cells," Professor Rasko explains. ...

Important new hair-loss gene discovered

... The results reveal that more than one gene is involved in the development of male hair-loss. These results also throw interesting light on the inheritance of baldness in that hitherto the only known risk gene for the androgen receptor lay on the X-chromosome, and was thus inherited from the mother ...

Large reservoir of mitochondrial DNA mutations identified in humans

... DNA mutations in the general population, for example, have depended on identification of clinically affected patients and subsequent retracing of inheritance on the maternal side of the family. This approach fails to detect the gradual accumulation of mutations in some members of the population, including ...

Can you be born a couch potato?

... at Charlotte kinesiologist J. Timothy Lightfoot announced that they had found six specific chromosomal locations that significantly correlate to the inheritance of a trait of high physical activity in mice, indicating that at least six genetic locations were affecting activity. Now, in a study forthcoming in ...

Charcot-marie-tooth disease research funding

... or CMT. CMT is the most common inherited neuromuscular disease, affecting as many as one in every 2,500 individuals. CMT usually shows dominant inheritance and symptoms generally appear during adolescence or young adulthood. It is characterized by degeneration of long motor and sensory axons, which ...

New gene discovered for new form of intellectual disability

... this mutation was found on the autosome (The 22 pairs of non-sex chromosomes, that make up the 46 chromosomes in the human body). Autosomal-recessive inheritance (where both mother and father carry a gene mutation on one chromosome, but both maternal and paternal copies must be passed on to the offspring to ...

Computation to unravel how genes are regulated and shed light on how cells become different

... changes in their expression is fundamental to development of organisms, along with their structure and function during their lifetime, as well as inheritance of adaptations to environmental factors. ...

Team finds an economical way to boost the vitamin A content of maize

... production of the precursors of vitamin A. They also used association mapping, which involves studying variation in selected genes and tracking inheritance patterns to see which form of a gene coincides with the highest provitamin A content. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) allowed them to amplify and ...

Mom's obesity during conception phase may set the stage for offspring's obesity risk

... Studies also show that greater body-weight at birth and weight gain early in life increases the risk of becoming overweight or obese as an adult. inheritance studies show that a child's body mass index (BMI) correlates more closely with the mother's BMI than with it's father's, suggesting that an ...

From GM farm animals to embryonic stem cell research

... Tomorrows Questions gives us a chance to examine the latest findings on how genomics - which embraces a whole range of biological processes from inheritance to development and beyond - is impacting on peoples lives. The work of the ESRC Genomics Network spans the whole field - covering areas as ...

The importance of gene regulation for common human disease

... cell cultures from participants from four populations as well as, for some samples, information from families, which can help to understand inheritance of genetic variation. The team used these resources to study gene activity in the cell cultures and tie that to DNA sequence variation We have ...

Researcher gives hard thoughts on soft inheritance

... to generation, what biologists call hard inheritance because the nucleotide sequence of DNA is ... life, but their importance in controlling inheritance has been debated. Many biologists are skeptical ... mechanism to do soft inheritance, and epigenetic inheritance can be construed as a form soft inheritance. ...

Plants defy Mendel's inheritance laws, may prompt textbook changes

... Contrary to inheritance laws the scientific world has accepted for more ... flies in the face of the scientific laws of inheritance first described by Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s ... around the world today. "This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought in the ...

Mapping the mouse genome

... of the mouse genome, the authors were able to track the patterns of inheritance of >10,000 SNPs in both groups of mice. Next, they were able to calculate ... to recombination rates--information that can improve our understanding of inheritance and inform future efforts to pinpoint the precise location of genes on ...

Two central mysteries in genome inheritance solved at UCSD

... division, the "chromosome-spindle" connection, which is critical for the inheritance of genetic information as cells divide, has remained elusive. ... solutions to two long-standing mysteries about the mechanism of genome inheritance during cell division. "These two discoveries open the door to further ...

The higher the hierarchy, the greater the aggression

... developed two simple mathematical models that predicted that, if inheritance rank mattered in a cooperative society, then the rates of aggression would ... the authors. Cant et al. conclude that variation in future fitness due to inheritance rank is the hidden factor accounting for much of the variation in ...

Exploring the dark matter of the genome

... notes that one intensively studied and puzzling problem in chromosome biology will benefit enormously from the new findings: epigenetics -- the inheritance of traits and genetic information as controlled by proteins associated with the chromosomes, rather than by DNA sequence. Starting in the 1920s, ...

Latent memory of cells comes to life

... these changes can be that a latent capacity that was dormant comes to life, or, conversely, that a previously active capacity shuts down. Same inheritance ?different traits In the practical experiment molecular biologists used a mutant of a yeast cell which was bi-stable, in that it could become ...

Researchers identify gene involved in dog size

... of the NHGRI Division of Intramural Research. “Discoveries like this illustrate the exciting promise of genomics research for understanding the inheritance of a wide range of traits, including those that have an impact on health and disease.? The branch of the canine family tree that includes ...

Analysis of rhesus monkey genome uncovers genetic differences with humans, chimps

... populations, and developed a set of 'single nucleotide polymorphisms' or SNPs (single base DNA differences) that can be used for future analysis of inheritance of biomedically important traits in rhesus. The rhesus genomic DNA samples used for these studies were contributed by the California NPRC, Oregon ...

Scripps research study reveals structural dynamics of single prion molecules

... diseases. Intriguingly, certain prions and amyloids can play beneficial roles. The subject of the new study, Sup35, enables protein-based inheritance in yeast. When this prion protein misfolds, it converts into self-perpetuating amyloid fibrils, thus altering its function in an inheritable manner. ...