Phenotype in Biological News

Mary had a lot of lambs: Researchers identify way to accelerate sheep breeding

... said, "so there are a lot of genes controlling it." Mateescu observed the phenotype the physical expression of the gene in the researchers' flock during a ... of the protein. This means that it may be an accurate indicator for the phenotype of breeding out of season, though it's uncertain whether the gene actually ...

December 2008 highlights from Biology of Reproduction

... a paper on p. 1038, Park et al. report genetic background effects on the phenotype produced by Dax1 (Nrob1) deficiency in mice. Intriguing work from several laboratories has demonstrated that the severity of the Dax1 -deficiency phenotype is greatest on a C57BL/6J background and milder on a 129 genetic ...

NIH's Genes, Environment and Health Initiative adds 6 studies

... view study documents, such as protocols, questionnaires and summaries of phenotype data. The second is the controlled-access portion of the database, which allows approved researchers to download individual-level genotype and phenotype data from which the study participants' personal identifiers, such as ...

Cancer signatures uncovered

... One of the three described groups of cancers has an early developmental phenotype and expresses genes that are characteristic of stem cells. From a ... The third is a small group of cancers that present as a transition phenotype between these two extremes and displays both characteristics. ...

Mouse can do without man's most treasured genes

... deletion of the same gene in the mouse and in humans produces the same phenotype (an observable trait such as presence or absence of a particular disease). ... diseases, such as neurological diseases related to vacuole proteins, the phenotype is so different that it may be necessary to establish a primate model." ...

Genes, Environment and Health Initiative invests in genetic studies, environmental monitoring

... documents, such as protocols, questionnaires and summaries of genotype and phenotype data. The second is the controlled-access portion of the database, which allows approved researchers to download individual-level genotype and phenotype data from which the study participants personal identifiers, such as ...

La Jolla Institute discovers novel tumor suppressor

... diseases, so we began working with mice genetically engineered not to have that enzyme," he said. "We noticed that these mice developed a strange phenotype myeloproliferation and a variety of tumors including lymphomas and some carcinomas." Dr. Kawakami said this surprising occurrence suggested that ...

Protecting cells from their neighbors

... mechanism that protects is also universal", explains Casanova. In the 1960s, Drosophila was the model in which researchers described a phenotype named pole hole. Embryos, that did not survive, showed a cavity in one of the poles of the egg in which cells were lacking. "It was thought that this ...

UCLA cancer researchers develop model that may help identify cancer stem cells

... can be maintained over time in this environment, and we can live sort candidate lung cancer stem cells from these primary cultures to evaluate their phenotype in various bioassays." Batra and his team were successful seven out of seven times in growing heterogeneous cell cultures from seven different ...

American Society for Microbiology honors George Liu

... color imparted by carotenoid pigments of Staphylococcus aureus became the next focus of Dr. Liu's work. He demonstrated a role of this hallmark phenotype in virulence. Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, England and his M.D. from the University of California, San Diego. ...

Plant Min protein sits tight and rescues E. coli

... expressed the Arabidopsis MinD gene (AtMinD), in E. coli cells that lacked the bacterial genes for both MinD and MinE. Surprisingly, the minicell phenotype of this E. coli HL1 mutant (MinDE) was rescued by the plant AtMinD gene, even though the dynamic MinE protein was absent. The Arabidopsis ...

TB -- hiding in plain sight

... Rahman et al "provide[s] evidence that the adaptive immune response in establishment of clinical TB [is] skewed towards a suppressive or regulatory phenotype that may inhibit proper immune activation and down-regulate the host response at the local site of infection. Compartmentalization of the immune ...

Stowers researchers develop whole genome sequencing approach for mutation discovery

... flies can be randomly mutated to generate interesting phenotypes relevant to human disease. Finding the mutated gene responsible for an interesting phenotype is labor intensive and time consuming, and many mutations that cause medically relevant phenotypes are not discovered. The new approach lowers the ...

Using combinatorial libraries to engineer genetic circuits advances synthetic biology

... yeast, which could accurately time yeast sedimentation -- a process that can be applied to biotechnology and some popular brewed beverages. "The phenotype is crucial in industrial beer, wine and bioethanol fermentation, as it allows for easy removal of yeast sediments after all the sugars have been ...

Ali Shilatifard and colleagues aim to clarify the definition of 'epigenetics'

... to human development and disease, but they are poorly understood. The proposed definition reads: "an epigenetic trait is a stably inherited phenotype resulting from changes in a chromosome without alterations in the DNA sequence." Shilatifard and colleagues have also proposed three categories of ...

Stroma genomic signature predicts resistance to anthracyclin-based chemotherapy in breast cancer

... in breast cancer' i, published in Nature Medicine , Dr Pierre Farmer and colleagues showed the potential of the reactive stroma to modulate tumor phenotype and the clinical response to treatment. This is a major step forward in the field as identifying factors that influence response to cancer ...

New asthma research opposes current drug treatment, says UH prof

... of chronically stimulating it to reduce asthma symptoms. The study, "Beta2-Adrenoreceptor Signaling is Required for the Development of an Asthma phenotype in a Murine Model," is in the current online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ), one of the world's ...

February 2009 highlights from Biology of Reproduction

... role in fertility, but there has been no genetic test to clarify mechanisms. Now, in a paper on p. 235 of this issue, Sun et al. characterize the phenotype of mice genetically lacking FAAH, fatty acid amide hydrolase. Male mice homozygous for the Faah knockout have elevated levels of anandamide, an ...

New scientific knowledge on juvenile diabetes

... systematically studies the chemical fingerprints in cells, tissues and biofluids in a given physiological and environmental context. The metabolic phenotype is sensitive to subtle factors such as age, lifestyle, nutrition and the microbe environment of the intestines. Changes in the concentrations of ...

Penn scientists discover cells reorganize shape to fit the situation

... Now Tran's group is working to address several questions that arise from this research. First, how long can mutant cells maintain their wild-type phenotype once they are removed from the physical constraints of the microfluidic channel? How do the two protein complexes work together to affect cell shape? ...

What is wild? Odor attraction among different wildtype Drosophila

... and especially to single odor components. "These flies, which have only until recently been living in nature, are very likely to show the original phenotype of Drosophila melanogaster behavior: they respond as other insect species also do very selectively to host signals and do not just rely on one ...

70 years old and going strong with Down syndrome and no dementia

... with an extra copy of Chromosome 21, and these third copies of genes on Chromosome 21 lead to an overproduction of certain proteins that cause the phenotype of Down syndrome, including familiar facial features, congenital heart diseases, cognitive impairments, and other conditions. Previous studies of ...

Oxidative stress: Mechanism of cell death clarified

... dependent enzymes", explains Marcus Conrad. The induced inactivation of GPx4 caused massive oxidation of lipids and eventually cell death. A similar phenotype could be observed when intracellular GSH was removed from wild-type cells by a chemical inhibitor of GSH biosynthesis. Interestingly enough, this ...

Dense tissue promotes aggressive cancers

... tissue is correlated with more aggressive tumors and a poorer prognosis for patients. "The idea that tissue rigidity leads to a more aggressive phenotype had been out there for a while," she said, "but it hadn't actually been tied to matrix degradation, which is thought to be important for metastasis ...

ETH Zurich study on salmonella self-destruction

... new biological explanation for this phenomenon. The two salmonella phenotypes share their work, with the result being that they achieve what a single phenotype on its own would not be capable of doing. This scenario is fundamentally different from the usual explanations and presupposes that individual ...

Study finds connections between genetics, brain activity and preference

... that define our range of behaviors," says Hans Breiter, MD, senior and corresponding author of the study and principal investigator for the phenotype Genotype Project in Addiction and Mood Disorders, an interdisciplinary project involving the MGH Departments of Radiology, Psychiatry, and Neurology. ...

UNC, Caltech research finds further evidence for genetic contribution to autism

... interaction and will be able to explain to them how they differ from neurotypical people." Piven said that this approach may disaggregate the phenotype in autism and provide new targets for genetic studies. "In other words, it may lead us to finding genes that are responsible for the face-processing ...

Tumor-inhibiting protein could be effective in treating leukemia

... back to their leukemia phenotype. "We haven't repaired the genetic abnormality in the cell, but what we have done is push them into a more normal phenotype that could then be treated more easily." Tuszynski also said that the research demonstrates the ability of Angiocidin to stimulate the body's ...

Automated microfluidic device reduces time to screen small organisms for genetic studies

... device developed by engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The new "lab-on-a-chip" can automatically position, image, determine the phenotype of and sort small animals, such as the worm Caenorhabditis elegans that is commonly used for biological studies. "Classical genetic approaches ...

Human Genomics and Proteomics

... and Proteomics with a presentation on Saturday 31st May 2008 at the Human Genome Variation Society symposium: How to Explore Human Genotype to phenotype Relationships, a satellite event of the European Society of Human Genetics 2008 meeting, Barcelona, Spain http://www.hgvs.org/Barcelona08 . A copy ...

New computer applications allow to classify Iberian pig meat automatically

... out a more advanced study with 66 Iberian pigs applying the above mentioned techniques in order to identify the genetic purity of the Iberian phenotype expressed in animals, as well as to improve the control, security and quality levels in the productive chain according to the from the farm to the ...

Concentrating on different aspects of pain leads to breakthrough in migraine genetics

... However, no genes have yet been convincingly associated with migraine susceptibility, probably due to the high degree of variability of the disease phenotype combined with the lack of viable laboratory tests. To address this problem, we developed a new analysis technique concentrating on different ...

Crop scientists discover gene that controls fruit shape

... out of elongated fruit-bearing plants, they produced round fruit similar to the wild tomatoes. SUN doesnt tell us exactly how the fruit-shape phenotype is altered, but what we do know is that turning the gene on is very critical to result in elongated fruit, van der Knaap said. We can now move ...

Story tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, March 2008

... genetically analyzing plants exposed to an unknown environmental stress and then comparing that genomic signature against a database of already known phenotype information linked to specific genes within the plant. A network analysis determines the gene clusters responsible for the behavior. These clusters ...

Moss protein plays role in Alzheimer's disease

... obviously, did not require Notch. We just dont know exactly what it is yet, but we have proposed a hypothesis to be tested, Quatrano said. The phenotype piqued Kopans interest: He saw the potential of looking at the role of presenilin independent of Notch. Khandelwal and Chandu took the phenotype, ...

New study reveals for first time how BRCA1 mutations cause breast cancer

... has a role downstream in the same DNA double strand break repair pathway as BRCA1, but tumors from BRCA2 mutation carriers have a quite different phenotype compared to BRCA1 tumors, less often involving PTEN loss. However, like BRCA1, BRCA2 tumors have an instable genome with massive chromosomal ...

Journal Sleep: Insomniacs are more likely to report a family history of the sleep disorder

... of a past history of insomnia, either with or without current insomnia, emerged as a new and interesting candidate for future research examining phenotype and risk factors in insomnia. Insomnia is a classification of sleep disorders in which a person has trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or ...

Cell response to stress signals predicts tumors in women with common pre-breast cancer

... p16 and/or high COX-2 in the absence of cell proliferation reflected correct stress activation and a protective response to cellular stress. This phenotype begins to identify women less likely to have a subsequent tumor event after a diagnosis of DCIS, said Tlsty. It supports the hypothesis that the ...

Genetic contributions to human brain morphology and intelligence

... effects of multiple genes and possibly the interaction among genes, also needs investigation as the high heritability of a complex quantitative phenotype such as brain volume cannot be explained by a single-gene polymorphism Conclusion MRI studies in twins indicate that, given the basic ...

UF researchers devise way to calculate rates of evolution

... National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif. One says the environment dictates changes that occur in the genome and phenotype of a species, and the other says the DNA mutation rate drives these changes. Our findings suggest physiological processes that drive mutation rates ...