Owing to their sessile nature, plants maintain cell pluripotency or totipotency throughout their life cycles. Somatic plant cells are able to regenerate themselves in response to mechanical stimuli, or to go through somatic ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Aug 11, 2020
0
18
One reason a technique for cloning animals often results in oversized placentas, and hence failed births, has been uncovered in mice by an all-RIKEN team. This finding will help improve the success rate of the cloning method ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 10, 2020
1
209
Typically, each somatic cell in an organism holds the same amount of DNA. However, researchers have, for the first time, shed light on a process that leads to tissue-specific differences in DNA content in plants. With an ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jun 2, 2020
0
98
Identifying different types of cells within a tissue or an organ can be very challenging and time-consuming. Methods to identify cell types from single-cell RNA sequencing data have been proposed, but they all fall short ...
Cell & Microbiology
May 19, 2020
0
37
When the machinery that guides the transition of stem cells to somatic cells doesn't shut down properly, cells can become cancerous. Identifying the mechanisms that impede those processes would offer scientists a target for ...
Cell & Microbiology
Feb 11, 2020
0
111
An international team led by Alexander Suh at Uppsala University has sequenced a chromosome in zebra finches called the germline-restricted chromosome (GRC). This chromosome is only found in germline cells, the cells that ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 2, 2019
0
30
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have uncovered a chromosome-wide mechanism that keeps the gene expression of sex chromosomes in balance in our cells. The findings shed light on molecular reasons for early miscarriage ...
Biotechnology
Oct 3, 2019
0
83
Scientists know that age and weight are risk factors in the development of cancer. That should mean that whales, which include some of the largest and longest-lived animals on Earth, have an outsized risk of developing cancer.
Molecular & Computational biology
May 9, 2019
1
266
Mutation rates are proposed to be a pragmatic balance struck between the harmful effects of mutations and the costs of suppressing them; this hypothesis predicts that longer-lived body parts and those that contribute to the ...
Biotechnology
Apr 9, 2019
0
33
In mammals, females have a limited supply of oocytes. Oocytes have a unique epigenome with approximately half the DNA methylation of sperm, and the most terminally differentiated somatic cells. Until recently, regulators ...
Biotechnology
Nov 29, 2018
0
55
