Breaking up is hard to do (especially for sex chromosomes)

As chromosomes go, X and Y make an unlikely pair. The X is large and contains thousands of genes critical for life. The Y, by contrast, is little more than a nub. Its main purpose is to provide the instructions for initiating ...

Details of the history of inner Eurasia revealed by new study

An international team of researchers has combined archaeological, historical and linguistic data with genetic information from over 700 newly analyzed individuals to construct a more detailed picture of the history of inner ...

CNIO researchers delve into the behavior of cohesins

Cohesins are protein complexes that join the two copies of each chromosome—called sister chromatids—to ensure that they are shared fairly between the daughter cells during cell division. In this way, each daughter cell ...

Preventing the spread of repression

Scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research have identified a novel and unexpected regulatory activity of RNA at the edge of inactive chromosomal regions. In their publication in Nature Structural ...

New light shed on chromosome fragility

Why are certain chromosome regions prone to breakages? The answer is crucial, as this fragility is involved in the development of tumors. A team from the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire ...

Pairing up: How chromosomes find each other

After more than a century of study, mysteries still remain about the process of meiosis -- a special type of cell division that helps insure genetic diversity in sexually-reproducing organisms. Now, researchers at Stowers ...

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