Plants fix DNA differently from animals

In mammalian cells, the transcription factor p53 most responsible for healthy growth of the organism. The equivalent in plants is Suppressor Of Gamma Response 1 (SOG1), a factor that does not share a common evolutionary ancestor ...

Pioneering discovery of an odor-detecting receptor enhancer

Each odor-detecting neuron (referred to as olfactory sensory neuron from here on), chooses a single odorant receptor gene from a fairly large number of options that are split into class I (fish-like) and class II (terrestrial-specific) ...

New CRISPR tool targets RNA in mammalian cells

Researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have shown that a CRISPR-based editing system can cut and bind RNA in mammalian cells. In a paper out this week in Nature, the team used CRISPR-Cas13, which the researchers ...

Diagnostic tools using synthetic biology

(Phys.org)—Synthetic biology is a multi-disciplinary field that applies engineering techniques to biological systems. While the foundations of synthetic biology were laid in the 1990s with the burgeoning of genomics and ...

Why some genes are highly expressed

The DNA in our cells is folded into millions of small packets, like beads on a string, allowing our two-meter linear DNA genomes to fit into a nucleus of only about 0.01 mm in diameter. However, these molecular beads, called ...

Researchers greatly increase precision of new genome editing tool

CRISPR-Cas9 is a powerful new tool for editing the genome. For researchers around the world, the CRISPR-Cas9 technique is an exciting innovation because it is faster and cheaper than previous methods. Now, using a molecular ...

We're all mammals – so why do we look so different?

It is easy to distinguish a mouse from a cow. But for members of the same class of mammal, where do such differences begin? In 2011, scientists discovered there were differences in cow and mice blastocysts, the tiny hollow ...

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