utenzi

There's an interesting press release from McGill University today. Apparently some of their researchers (Dr. Morris Schweitzer, Dr. Bruce Gottlieb, Dr. Lorraine Chalifour and colleagues) have a paper coming out in the journal Human Mutation today which suggests that the DNA in white blood cells isn't the same as that of normal tissue. "So what?" you say. Well, you have to understand that when we do research on genetics we usually don't have access to tissue since living people don't want their parts cut into. So we take a vial of blood, spin out the red blood cells which don't have DNA, and then extract DNA from the remaining leukocytes (white blood cells). Up to now it's been assumed that DNA in one cell of the body would be the same as in any other. So this puts into question any research or medical treatment that depends on genetic information from blood. Assuming the McGill University group is correct, of course. Here's a quote from the press...

You're not getting any older--just your blood is. LOL The story is actually a lot more complicated than that but there's two articles in the August 10 issue of Science that indicate that the environment (ie blood) our cells are in is a lot more important vis a vis aging than the cells themselves. Further, that it's a protein referred to as wnt that is the big player in this. Wnt has long been known to be a very important regulatory protein. The name is derived from "wingless" and "integrative" and dates back to early genetic work on fruit flies on the wingless side and vertebrate studies on the integrative. As you can see to the left, the wnt pathway is complex. My research has dipped into the APC area quite a few times and one of the genes I'm working on right now is for a frizzled protein (the FRZ in the diagram) but I've never worked with wnt directly. Back to the Science article. Thomas Rando, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology a...

I've got a story below that's off of the Reuters' science wire. It sparked a few thoughts in me about science and genetics and nature. According to this news item, there's a big push starting to determine the genetics of the Eucalyptus tree. The stated benefits include developing trees that respond better to stressors like salt and aridity as well as improved hardness and density of the wood itself. However they also stress that they aren't going to make any genetic changes to the tree, just catalog the genes. My question is how are you going to reap those benefits without changing the tree? LOL Of course you can't. My point here is that many people are concerned when they hear that an organism is having it's genotype changed yet that's what we've been doing for thousands of years. Dogs used to be wolves. Not anymore. The list of genetically modified critters and plants is long and very advantageous to mankind. We've just been doing it by incest...

I read an online article today by Maggie Fox, a health and science editor at Reuters. The article is about a mutation in one breed of dogs that seems to enable the dog to run much faster. Here's an excerpt from the article: A gene that helps control muscle development makes all the difference between an elite racing dog and a freak that is put down at birth, scientists reported on Tuesday. Racing whippets that carried one copy of the mutated gene were among the fastest runners, but those that carried two copies became unattractively bulky and were usually destroyed by breeders, the researchers said. The next step may be to look for this gene in human athletes to see if it helps explain what makes some competitors excel, said Dr. Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who led the study. The gene controls a muscle protein called myostatin. "Our work is the first to link athletic performance to a mutation in the myostatin gene and could have im...