Tag: genetics

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Many Female Brains Contain Male DNA

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In the first study of its kind, researchers have discovered that male DNA is commonly found in the brains of women – a finding that could hold important implications for diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.

Male DNA is likely transferred to female brains during pregnancy, according to researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.  During this time, mothers and fetuses exchange and harbor genetic material and cells in a phenomenon called microchimerism. Read full article.

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Why Fathers Really Matter

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MOTHERHOOD begins as a tempestuously physical experience but quickly becomes a political one. Once a woman’s pregnancy goes public, the storm moves outside. Don’t pile on the pounds! Your child will be obese. Don’t eat too little, or your baby will be born too small. For heaven’s sake, don’t drink alcohol. Oh, please: you can sip some wine now and again. And no matter how many contradictory things the experts say, don’t panic. Stress hormones wreak havoc on a baby’s budding nervous system. Read full article.

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Mother’s Genes May Explain Why Women Outlive Men

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An evolutionary “loophole” might explain why males of many species live shorter lives than their female counterparts, a new study finds.

The loophole lies in the mitochondria, the energy-generating parts of our cells. The mitochondria have their own DNA, separate from the DNA that resides in the nucleus of the cell that we usually think of when we think of the genome. In almost all species, the mitochondria DNA is passed down solely from mother to child, without input from dad.

This direct line of inheritance may allow harmful mutations to accumulate, according to a new study detailed today (Aug. 2) in the journal Current Biology. Ordinarily, natural selection helps keep harmful mutations to a minimum by ensuring they’re not passed down to offspring. But if a mitochondrial DNA mutation is dangerous only to males and doesn’t harm females, there’s nothing to stop mom from passing it to her daughters and sons.

“If a mitochondrial mutation pops up that is benign in females, or a mutation pops up that is beneficial to females, this mutation will slip through the gates of natural selection and go through to the next generation,” said study researcher Damian Dowling, an evolutionary biologist at Monash Univeristy in Australia.

The result: a load of mutations that don’t harm females, but add up to a shorter life span for males.

Read full article.

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Rolling the Dice of a Genetic Legacy

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“Don’t worry. She won’t break.”

This is a classic cliché of new parenthood. “Don’t worry,” nurses say to insecure new parents hesitant to hold their infants. “She won’t break.”

But I know the truth: Babies can break. I broke when I was eight months old, and a year old, and again and again and again. Three dozen broken bones before my twelfth birthday.

And then, at 31, I passed a flawed gene on to my daughter—the gene that caused my osteogenesis imperfecta (OI or “brittle bone disease”) and makes bones fragile instead of resilient.

For my daughter’s second birthday, we bought a child-sized couch to provide a safe place for her—our tiny, fragile girl—to climb without the risk of tumbling from the regular couch to the floor. As she climbed around on the new mini-couch, she fell and broke her leg.

I could not make up a better introduction to the capricious disorder we live with. Last year, my daughter (now 12) fell down a flight of stairs while lining up for a choir concert. She was embarrassed, but fine. A few months ago, she was putting away a laptop computer in her science class when her arm cracked under its weight.

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Sperm Sequencing Could Help Fight Infertility

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Not all sperm are created equal. The first genetic comparison of individual sperm cells has revealed just how diverse they can be. The technology used to study these tiny cells might also be used to study cancer and allow doctors to screen eggs for in vitro fertilisation.

To investigate how much variety there is in one man’s sperm, Stephen Quake, Jianbin Wang and their colleagues at Stanford University in California compared sperm cells from a single semen sample.

Analysing the genes of individual cells is notoriously tricky, though. “It’s hard to express how difficult single cell experiments are,” says Adam Auton at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. To perform genetic sequencing, you need to amplify, or make lots of copies of the genes within a cell to have enough to analyse. The compounds needed for amplification produce chemical by-products that can make the analysis more difficult.

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U-M registers six new embryonic stem cell lines

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The genetic mutation responsible for a blood clotting disorder known as hemophilia B is among two embryonic stem cell lines created by the University of Michigan and believed to be the first in the world to carry the disease, officials announced Thursday.

The two stem cell lines are among six new lines created by U-M and added to the national registry, bringing the total number of lines the university has created to eight.

The lines are available for federally funded research by scientists across the country to study the origin and potential treatments for diseases such as Huntington’s disease, a fatal brain disorder, and a heart condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which causes sudden death in athletes and others.

“Our last three years of work have really begun to pay off, paving the way for scientists worldwide to make novel discoveries that will benefit human health in the near future,” says Gary Smith, Ph.D., who derived the lines and also is co-director of the U-M Consortium for Stem Cell Therapies, part of the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute.

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