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Tag: "rita" at biology news

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

Contrary to inheritance laws the scientific world has accepted for more than 100 years, some plants revert to normal traits carried by their grandparents, bypassing genetic abnormalities carried by both parents. . These mutant parent plants apparently have hidden templates containing genetic information from the preceding generation that can be transferred to their offspring, even though the trai...

Key mechanism in genetic inheritance during cell division identified

A key mechanism in the passing of genetic material from a parent cell to daughter cells appears to have been identified by a team of Berkeley researchers. Their study may explain how a complex of proteins, called kinetochores, can recognize and stay attached to microtubules, hollow fibers in the walls of biological cells that are responsible for the faithful segregation of chromosomes during cell...

Maine Researchers Find Exceptions to Old Rules of Genetic Inheritance

Discoveries by a research team from Maine could help to settle a long-standing debate in genetics. .. .. The Maine research group challenges that proposal, demonstrating that genes wi...

Envisat and ERS-2 reveal hidden side of Hurricane Rita

As Hurricane Rita entered the Gulf of Mexico, ESA's Envisat satellite's radar was able to pierce through swirling clouds to directly show how the storm churns the sea surface. This image has then been used to derive Rita's wind field speeds. . Envisat acquired this Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) image at 0344 UTC on 22 September (2345 on 21 September in US Eastern Daylight Saving Time),...

Ritalin packs punch by elevating norepinephrine, suppressing nerve signal transmissions

Methylphenidate (Ritalin) elevates norepinephrine levels in the brains of rats to help focus attention while suppressing nerve signal transmissions in the sensory pathways to make it easier to block out extraneous stimuli, a Philadelphia research team has found. . Their report in the Journal of Neurophysiology helps explain how a stimulant aids people with attention deficit and hyperactivity diso...

Researcher gives hard thoughts on soft inheritance

Organisms, including humans, all inherit DNA from generation to generation, what biologists call hard inheritance because the nucleotide sequence of DNA is constant and only changes by rare random mutation as it is passed down the generations. . But there also is evidence, especially in plants, that non-genetic factors modifying the DNA can also be inherited. The modifications of the genetic ma...

Two central mysteries in genome inheritance solved at UCSD

The dance of the chromosomes during cell division, first described in the late 1800s and familiar to all high-school students from movies shown in biology classes, has long fascinated biologists. However, the molecular nature of a key component of cell division, the "chromosome-spindle" connection, which is critical for the inheritance of genetic information as cells divide, has remained elusive...

Inheritance outside DNA

Most people have heard that human inheritance is spelled out in our DNA and activated through our genes. Yet few know anything about epigenetics, a variety of methods that our cells have evolved to transmit heritable changes without changing DNA. . .. Genomic imprinting is a type of epigenetic change that causes one copy of a particular gene to be turned off, depending on its parental origin. It...