Why fruit flies are a good genetic model for human disease study

If you have a Facebook account, you are likely to have seen someone pour an ice bucket on themselves in the name of raising awareness for amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ALS is a disease that affects nerve cells in the ...

Origins of genomic 'dark matter' discovered

A duo of scientists at Penn State University has achieved a major milestone in understanding how genomic "dark matter" originates. This "dark matter"—called non-coding RNA—does not contain the blueprint for making proteins ...

A skeleton for chromosomes

Researchers at the IMP Vienna discovered that cohesin stabilizes DNA. Jan-Michael Peters and his team at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) found that the structure of Chromosomes is supported by a kind of ...

Malaria in the Americas presents a complex picture

(Phys.org) —Human migrations – from the prehistoric epoch to the present day – have extended cultures across the globe. With these travelers have come unwanted stowaways: mosquito-borne parasites belonging to the Plasmodium ...

The fight against genome parasites

In the gonads of animals, genome parasites such as transposons pose a serious threat to evolutionary fitness. With their ability to bounce around in the genome, they often cause dangerous mutations. To protect genomic integrity, ...

The many faces of the bacterial defense system

Even bacteria have a kind of "immune system" they use to defend themselves against unwanted intruders – in their case, viruses. Scientists at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany, were ...

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