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Stephen Gaeta (featured previously) is a doctor and an artist. He uses visual humor to illustrate medicine and typography to create art about science. This graphic called Transgenic is composed of the text from the DNA of chromosome 1 of the human gene. It’s a very long code! See the full size version at his site. Link
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Instructables user General Eggs has step-by-step instructions on how to make a model of the double helix. Besides a fun crafting activity, it’s a learning opportunity for biology students. Then it’s only a short step to breeding a race of genetically engineered workers.
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Could the building blocks of life been first delivered to Earth from outer space? That is what some research may be suggesting.
“People have been finding nucleobases in meteorites for about 50 years now, and have been trying to figure out if they are of biological origin or not,” study co-author Jim Cleaves, a chemist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told SPACE.com.
To help confirm if any nucleobases seen in meteorites were of extraterrestrial origin, scientists used the latest scientific analysis techniques on samples from a dozen meteorites — 11 organic-rich meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites and one ureilite, a very rare type of meteorite with a different chemical composition. This was the first time all but two of these meteorites had been analyzed for nucleobases.
The analytical techniques probed the mass and other features of the molecules to identify the presence of extraterrestrial nucleobases and see that they apparently did not come from the surrounding area.
Two of the carbonaceous chondrites contained a diverse array of nucleobases and structurally similar compounds known as nucleobase analogs. Intriguingly, three of these nucleobase analogs are very rare in Earth biology, and were not found in soil and ice samples from the areas near where the meteorites were collected at the parts-per-billion limits of their detection techniques.
“Finding nucleobase compounds not typically found in Earth’s biochemistry strongly supports an extraterrestrial origin,” Cleaves said
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From people claiming to be 130 years old to lying about their age in order to compete in the Olympics, lying about how old you are is a age old past time. Now however the next time you claim it’s your “29th birthday” your friends can snag a swab of your spit to prove you wrong.
This remarkable finding was made by researchers at UCLA. They found that the DNA contained in a person’s saliva undergoes changes as a person gets older. One of the building blocks of DNA experiences a process known as methylation, which alters its appearance over time and can be used to estimate precisely how old a person is.
The super powers of the X-Men may still may take awhile in the evolutionary process. However scientists have discovered that due to rapid population growth human evolution may be speeding up.
In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.
Thanks to stunning advances in sequencing and deciphering DNA in recent years, scientists had begun uncovering, one by one, genes that boost evolutionary fitness. These variants, which emerged after the Stone Age, seemed to help populations better combat infectious organisms, survive frigid temperatures, or otherwise adapt to local conditions.
Goethe University chemistry professor Alexander Heckel was working on DNA nanotechnology when he got married, so naturally he made something fitting: the world’s smallest wedding rings, made from interlocking loops of DNA molecules!
Prof. Alexander Heckel and his doctoral student Thorsten Schmidt of Goethe University were able to create two rings of DNA only 18 nanometers in size, and to interlock them like two links in a chain. Such a structure is called catenan, a term derived from the Latin word catena (chain). [...]
From a scientific perspective, the structure is a milestone in the field of DNA nanotechnology, since the two rings of the catenan are, as opposed to the majority of the DNA nano-architectures that have already been realized, not fixed formations, but — depending on the environmental conditions — freely pivotable. They are therefore suitable as components of molecular machines or of a molecular motor.
Raymond Daniel Towler was imprisoned for almost 29 years for a crime he did not commit. Convicted by eyewitness testimony in 1981, he heard about DNA testing during the OJ trial in 1995. Fifteen years of trying to get proper tests done on the physical evidence of his case finally paid off when he was exonerated in 2010. But so many years behind bars makes the real world seem a strange place.
So many choices. Which car insurance. Which cereal. Which deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, soap, shampoo. Rows and rows of products. Varieties, sizes, colors. Which is cheaper? Which is better? What’s the best buy? Which gum to chew? When he went into prison there were, like, two kinds of chewing gum. Now there are a zillion. One of the small gifts he gives himself is trying all the gums. “I can spoil myself a little so long as I stay within my means,” he says. Papaya juice! Kiwi and strawberry nectar! Green tea! Arnold Palmer — he was a golfer when Towler went down. Now he is a drink, sweet and so incredibly thirst quenching.
The entire compelling story can be read at Esquire. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Michael Edwards)
A study of lice genes is helping scientists to pinpoint the era in history when humans began to wear clothing. Really.
The key to the study by David Reed and colleagues, which appears in Molecular Biology And Evolution, is that there are two kinds of lice that hang around humans: the head lice that live on our scalp, and the body lice that live in our clothes. At one point in the past these two shared a common ancestor, Reed reasoned, and the body lice would have split off and become a separate group once they had human clothing in which to live.
The genomes of the two kinds of lice split somewhere between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago, which means that humans ran naked for hundreds of thousands of years without body hair or clothing. Clothing probably arose during an Ice Age, and eventually enabled humans to leave Africa to explore colder parts of the world. Link
A French-led research team has sequenced the DNA of Theobroma cacao, a tree used in making chocolate. Specifically, they ascertained the genetic code of one type that is used to make gourmet chocolate. This development may allow scientists to genetically engineer these chocolate-producing trees to resist diseases and parasites, thus increasing the availability of top quality chocolate:
Currently, most cacao farmers earn about $2 per day, but producers of fine cacao earn more. Increasing the productivity and ease of growing cacao can help to develop a sustainable cacao economy. The trees are now also seen as an environmentally beneficial crop because they grow best under forest shade, allowing for land rehabilitation and enriched biodiversity.
The team’s work identified a variety of gene families that may have future impact on improving cacao trees and fruit either by enhancing their attributes or providing protection from fungal diseases and insects that effect cacao trees.
Link via Fast Company | Photo via Flickr user Peter Pearson used under Creative Commons license
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Is schizophrenia caused by genetics or environment? The answer may be both, but in a way you’d never imagine. The culprit may be a virus! The good news is that you don’t have to worry about catching this virus. The bad news is that we all carry it in every cell of our bodies.
Sixty million years ago, a lemurlike animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated.”
But such genetic intrusions stick around a very long time, so humans are chockablock full of these embedded, or endogenous, retroviruses. Our DNA carries dozens of copies of Perron’s virus, now called human endogenous retrovirus W, or HERV-W, at specific addresses on chromosomes 6 and 7.
This virus was long thought to be “junk DNA”, which makes up a fair amount of our genetic material, but doesn’t affect us. The new line of research says that this virus, if it is activated at a certain age under the right conditions, may cause changes to human immune systems that lead to the development of not only schizophrenia, but multiple sclerosis and possibly other diseases. The story of how this discovery came about is a fascinating read at Discover magazine. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user ynse)
A Möbius strip is a ribbon of material that has only one side. A group of nanotechnology researchers experimenting with manipulating tiny objects was able to reshape a DNA strand into a Möbius strip.
The ability to create complex structures on the tiniest of scales is one of the great challenges of nanotechnology. In particular, chemists are looking for particular topological structures, or structures that keep their basic properties no matter how much you stretch or twist them. A Möbius strip is a good example of such a structure, because no matter what you do it (short of tearing it, of course), it will always have only one side.
Link | Journal Article (Subscription required) | Image: Han et al.
Dimas Aliprandi of Joao Neiva, Brazil always wondered why he didn’t look like his sisters. When he was 24, he finally could afford a DNA test which proved he was not the biological child of his parents. His parents were shocked! Further investigation found that Aliprandi was switched at birth with another boy born on the same day.
He said the hospital then searched its records and found Elton Plaster was born there on the same day.
The records led Aliprandi to the 35-acre (14-hectare) farm where Plaster lived with his parents, Nilza and Adelson, in the town of Santa Maria de Jetiba, about 30 miles (45 kilometers) from the Aliprandi home in Joao Neiva.
The Plasters agreed to do DNA tests.
“They discovered that Elton was the biological son of the man and woman that I had been calling Mom and Dad for 24 years,” Aliprandi said. “Meanwhile, Elton discovered that the couple he had always regarded as his biological parents were mine.”
What happened afterward is the most remarkable part of he story. The Plaster family invited the Aliprandi family to come and live on their farm, where they built another house! Both young men are now living with both their biological parents and the parents who raised them. Link -via reddit
(Image credit: AP/Julio Huber)
A Duke University engineer proposes that it’s possible to use custom-made DNA to generate self-assembling nanostructures that could be used as a cheap replacement for silicon microchips:
In his latest set of experiments, Chris Dwyer, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, demonstrated that by simply mixing customized snippets of DNA and other molecules, he could create literally billions of identical, tiny, waffle-looking structures.
Dwyer has shown that these nanostructures will efficiently self-assemble, and when different light-sensitive molecules are added to the mixture, the waffles exhibit unique and “programmable” properties that can be readily tapped. Using light to excite these molecules, known as chromophores, he can create simple logic gates, or switches.
Link via Popular Science | Image: Chris Dwyer/Duke University
Using ancient DNA extracted from specimens of woolly mammoths preserved in the Siberian permafrost, researchers from the University of Adelaide and other universities managed to reconstruct the hemoglobin of these long-extinct beasts. The researchers converted the protein’s DNA sequences into RNA and inserted it into E. coli bacteria, which then manufactured the ancient mammoth protein. Does that mean we’ll be seeing woolly mammoths strolling the streets of Adelaide any time soon?
No, says the study’s co-author, Professor Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide. "This is not going to bring the species back to life. We’ve only done this with one protein."
“It is the same as if we went back 30,000 years and stuck a needle into a living mammoth,” says Professor Cooper.
“This is true palaeobiology, as we can study and measure how these animals functioned as if they were alive today.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
How do you study an extinct virus? They don’t leave fossils behind! But some of them have left their DNA in other living things, including humans.
Over the expanse of evolutionary time, the genomes of virtually every animal species have become riddled with these proviral sequences, the so-called endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). Most ERV sequences have been degraded by the accumulation of mutations but are still recognizable as retroviral in origin. The human genome alone contains hundreds of thousands of HERVs (Human ERVs), outnumbering our genes. Extrapolate these numbers across the entirety of the animal kingdom, and collectively ERV loci may well comprise a “fossil” collection numbering in the hundreds of millions of specimens.
Find out more about paleovirology, the study of extinct viruses, at Small Things Considered. Link -via Boing Boing
From analysis of mitochondrial DNA extracted from a pinky finger bone, scientists have identified a new species of human ancestor. The 40,000-year-old bone fragment was found in a cave in the Altay mountains in Russia. The mitochondrial DNA shows that the person (they believe it was a child) it belonged to was neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens, but shared a common ancestor to both. University of Manchester geneticist Terry Brown co-authored an article released with the report in the journal Nature.
The new-human discovery implies that there was a wave of human migration out of Africa, the birthplace of humanity, that was completely unknown to science.
“We think Homo erectus”—an upright-walking but small-brained early human, or hominid—”was the first [hominid] to leave Africa two million years ago,” Brown explained. After that the record went blank until about 500,000 years ago, until now.
“This hominid seems to have left about a million years ago, so it fills in a bit of a gap,” he said.
Researchers will try to extract nuclear DNA from the bone, which carries more information than mitochondrial DNA. Link
(image credit: Johannes Krause)
Poet Christian Bök plans to alter the DNA of a particular species of bacteria so that it reflects an encoded version of his poetry:
Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem.[...]
Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Image: US Department of Energy
I can’t get enough of the video series at Big Think featuring Dr. Spencer Wells and his Genographic Project. Here’s a guy who I’d pick to be my professor of anthropology, molecular science, ancient history, and other topics that could use clear yet exciting delivery.
Wells’s own journey of discovery began as a child whose zeal for history and biology led him to the University of Texas, where he enrolled at age 16, majored in biology, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa three years later. He then pursued his Ph.D. at Harvard University under the tutelage of distinguished evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin. His landmark research findings led to advances in the understanding of the male Y chromosome and its ability to trace ancestral human migration.
All of the topics are intriguing and made more accessible through Wells’ evident passion for the subject matters. Here he talks about how the human population went from the brink of extinction (world poulation: 2,000, all in Africa) to migration and adaptation with development of better tools, art, and language.
Link to video. Link to bio and video directory.
Photo: Wikipedia
Some animals eats algae and incorporates the algae’s chlorophyll into its own body. According to Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa, the sea slug Elysia chlorotica no longer has to, because it has incorporated enough of the plant’s genes into its own DNA to manufacture chlorophyll in its own body!
The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.
“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.
Microbes swap genes readily, but Zardus said he couldn’t think of another natural example of genes flowing between multicellular kingdoms.
It looks like the tree of life has some spots where it merges as well as branches. Link
(image credit: Nicholas E. Curtis and Ray Martinez)
A team of scientists led by Keizo Tomonaga of Osaka University determined that a virus dating from 40 million years ago is embedded in human DNA. This infection, known as the bornavirus, might be the cause of schizophrenia and passes from generation to generation inside human cellular nuclei, filling out 8% of human genetic code:
The assimilation of viral sequences into the host genome is a process referred to as endogenization. This occurs when viral DNA integrates into a chromosome of reproductive cells and is subsequently passed from parent to offspring. Until now, retroviruses were the only viruses known to generate such endogenous copies in vertebrates. But Feschotte said that scientists have found that non-retroviral viruses called bornaviruses have been endogenized repeatedly in mammals throughout evolution.
Bornavirus (BDV) owes its name to the town of Borna, Germany, where a virus epidemic in 1885 wiped out a regiment of cavalry horses. BDV infects a range of birds and mammals, including humans. It is unique because it infects only neurons, establishing a persistent infection in its host’s brain, and its entire life cycle takes place in the nucleus of the infected cells.
Link via io9 | Image: US Department of Energy
Police found a leech at the scene of a robbery in Tasmania eight years ago. They took a sample of the blood the leech had consumed. In 2008, Peter Alec Cannon was arrested on an unrelated drug charge. The DNA from his blood matched the blood from the leech!
Cannon would probably have got away with the crime had he not been charged with drug offences late last year, and asked to give a DNA sample – which matched that from the crime scene.
Detective Inspector Mick Johnston, who was involved in the police investigation from the start, said Cannon’s conviction validated the use of DNA technology.
“It’s a testament to DNA evidence and the legislation that allows us to keep such evidence in relation to unsolved crimes – this is a fantastic result,” he said.
Link -via Boing Boing
(image credit: BBC)
On August 20, 1974, scientists at Cornell University and the National Science Foundation used the radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico to beam a message into space. Encoded within the binary digits of the message was information related to the Solar System, our number system, basic chemistry, and human DNA.
1679 digits were used for the message on the presumption that “any sentient being” would recognize the number as the product of two prime numbers (23 and 73), allowing the digits to be then rearranged from a linear binary stream into a graphic format (depicted at left, enhanced with color for clarity).
The message has been traveling through space for 25 years and is not due to arrive at its destination for another 24,975 years. Curiously, however, a reply was received in 2001, in the form of a crop circle near the Chilbolton radio telescope, in Hampshire, UK. The “return message” inserts the element silicon into the vital chemical elements of life, and incorporates an extra strand in the DNA double helix. The size of the creature depicted in the reply is approximately 3’4″, consistent with earthly reports of extraterrestrial visitations.
Those who need help to work their way through the information in the original message will find guidance at the University of Utah’s Physics and Astronomy Department, or at Wikipedia. More information re the reply and its implications at Crop Circle Research dotcom.
Charles Darwin was a lifelong fan of flowers, but was unable to figure out how they evolved. There were fossils of flowering plants going back 66-100 million years, which didn’t help much because flowers evolved much earlier. Recently, however, scientists are turning to DNA analysis of contemporary plants to decode where they came from. They are also finding older fossils than ever before, as far back as 136 million years ago. Paleobotanist James A. Doyle says the fossil record is the only thing that will bring together the many theories of flower evolution.
If you could travel back to 130 million years ago, you might not be impressed with the earliest flowers. “They didn’t look like they were going anywhere,” Dr. Doyle said.
Those early flowers were small and rare, living in the shadows of far more successful nonflowering plants. It took many millions of years for flowers to hit their stride. Around 120 million years ago, a new branch of flowers evolved that came to dominate many forests and explode in diversity. That lineage includes 99 percent of all species of flowering plants on Earth today, ranging from magnolias to dandelions to pumpkins. That explosion in diversity also produced the burst of flower fossils that so puzzled Darwin.
Genetic research is providing answers to how plants can switch on genes that control how different plants parts grow, and to use sexual reproduction to increase genetic diversity. Link
Lauren Davis of io9 describes four companies that make a portrait of you, right down to the profile of your DNA. Above is a portrait of a woman named Catherine from DNA Art Forms. It all started with a cheek swab:
After identifying 15 unique regions of your genetic code, clients consult with an artist as to how they want their DNA represented, be it as an abstract form, a landscape, or as an actual portrait including your image. Portraits start at $1500, and clients are consulted each step of the way, approving concept sketches before paint ever touches canvas.
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This has got to be one of the strangest police investigations ever. Detectives in Valencia County, New Mexico, identified a possible suspect by extracting DNA from a very unusual piece of evidence left by the thief: his own turd!
The thief used the bathroom and left his solid waste on display for the homeowner. "It’s more of an insult right there. It was a big slap in the face," the homeowner said.
That same type of evidence was found at several different burglary scenes. The detectives on the case said they used the thief’s calling card against him. The feces went into evidence and the state crime lab extracted DNA from it. "We ended up getting a hit," Rivera said.
Good work, CSI Valencia County! Link – via Dave Barry’s Blog
Another step in the quest to create life has been made, as scientists successfully transformed one bacteria into another by replacing it’s DNA with a related species’. Now, scientists are setting their sights on creating entirely new microbes with unique genome sequences, from scratch.
Dr Venter likened it to “changing a Macintosh computer into a PC by inserting a new piece of software” and stressed it would be more difficult in other kinds of cells, which have enzymes to snip the DNA of invaders.
But he said to achieve the feat, without adding anything more than naked DNA, “is a huge enabling step.”
“It’s a necessary step toward creating artificial life,” added microbiologist Fred Blattner of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Dr Venter said that, in the light of this success, the culmination of a decade’s work, he will be attempting the first transplant of a lab-made genome to create the first artificial life “within months.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by coconutnut.
A laboratory at Nucleix, a life-sciences company, was able to manufacture DNA that would be accurate enough to pass forensic scrutiny:
“You can just engineer a crime scene,” Nucleix founder Dan Frumkin told The New York Times. “The current forensic procedure fails to distinguish between such samples of blood, saliva, and touched surfaces with artificial DNA, and corresponding samples with in vivo generated (natural) DNA,” Frumkin and co-authors wrote in a recent Forensic Science International: Genetics study that announced the technological achievement.
Fortunately, the company offers a solution: one particular methyl group appears in naturally-occuring DNA, but not in Nucleix’s product.
(Links open in a new browser window/tab)
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Mitchell and Webb Take on Gordon Ramsay
This is a hilarious skit that sends up the foul-mouthed kitchen coach. (language NSFW) |
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How DNA Copies Itself
From the PBS program “DNA The Secret of Life”. |
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Richard Dawkins: Why are there still chimpanzees?
Richard Dawkins clears up the misunderstanding of Evolution that is all too common: If we descended from Chimpanzees, then why are there still Chimpanzees? |
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Uncanny Drew Carey Look-Alike on The Price is Right
He is the spittin’ image of Drew- but then so is every high school woodshop teacher in the US. |
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Cutting Edge Prosthetic Arms
Motorized prosthetic arms are now being matched to nerve endings beneath the skin – it seems we’re just a few steps away from Luke Skywalker’s robo-hand. |
For more the web’s most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
At one point in time in my graduate studies, I stopped being surprised at weird biological discoveries because, as one of my college professors said, when it comes to science, "there’s an exception to every rule, including this one" (think about it for a minute).
But this discovery by Morris Schweitzer and colleagues at McGill University and Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital revealed something that is mind boggling: your DNA may not be the same in different cells in your body:
Research by a group of Montreal scientists calls into question one of the most basic assumptions of human genetics: that when it comes to DNA, every cell in the body is essentially identical to every other cell.
Except for cancer, samples of diseased tissue are difficult or even impossible to take from living patients. Thus, the vast majority of genetic samples used in large-scale studies come in the form of blood. However, if it turns out that blood and tissue cells do not match genetically, these ambitious and expensive genome-wide association studies may prove to have been essentially flawed from the outset.
Here is an amazing CGI visualization of DNA coiling, replication, transcription and translation in real time as is occurring every second in our bodies. For me the most fascinating aspect of watching this is the realization of how the production of DNA in our cells is so industrious. It’s like watching a souped miniature assembly line working non stop! Created by by Drew Berry of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.
via – io9
