Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/genes vs environment

  • No gene is an island: What do scientists mean when they talk about environment and genes?

    Nope. This island does not represent your genes. (Source) When you read news stories about what affects a developing human in the womb or how cancer or obesity arises, you probably also see references to genes and environment. Some articles may focus on genes versus environment, or mention that something is “mostly” genetic or that the “environment” contributes to a disorder or trait in some way. What some people…

    Authored by on May 7, 2012

  • Biology Xplainer: Evolution and how it happens

    …he population will change over time. It will be adapted to its environment. It will evolve. Other mechanisms of evolution A pigeon depicted in Charles Darwin’sVariation of Animals and PlantsUnder Domestication, 1868. U.S.public domain image, via Wikimedia. When Darwin presented his idea of natural selection, he knew he had an audience to win over. He pointed out that people select features of organisms all the time and breed the…

    Authored by on January 29, 2012

  • Depressing genes

    ter all, that’s one of the reasons why scientists are trying to identify risk genes: to design better treatments for those disorders. [Image credit: DNA, public domain image from US govt. Image of Prozac, credit Tom Varco, CC 3.0 license.] [Siobhan Mitchell obtained a Neurobiology Ph.D. at the State University New York at Albany (SUNY Albany), followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Washington, Seattle. She currently works at the…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

  • UneXXpected Science: Does ADHD have benefits in certain environments?

    …nary terms. Modern society is just that—modern. This way of life has only been around for, at most, a few thousand years, which can be a blink of an eye for processes of natural selection. Dial back time about 10,000 years or 20,000 years, and you’ll be hard pressed to find any humans living in an environment anything remotely like a cubicle. Natural selection results from the interaction of genes and environment, and the “selection̶…

    Authored by on April 16, 2012

  • Literal XX Xplainer: How we can live with two X chromosomes

    …ous about this dosage compensation thing and will tolerate no Xtra dissent. If we kept the entire X chromosome active, that would be a lot of Xtra gene dosage. The X chromosome contains about 1100 genes, and in humans, about 300 diseases and disorders are linked to genes on this chromosome, including  hemophilia  and  Duchenne muscular dystrophy . Because males get only one chromosome, these X-linked diseases are more frequent among males–…

    Authored by on June 27, 2012

  • Unicorns and Brainbows

    orite, shown below: A cerebellar flocculus, a lobe in the cerebellum, from the original Brainbow paper (Source) Since its original description, researchers have used the Brainbow concept extensively — it has been cited 361 times, according to the Web of Science – and extended it into zebrafish and fruit flies, both species that researchers frequently use in experiments to trace gene expression and how animals develop. But though Lich…

    Authored by on May 6, 2013

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …ll selection of different materials: bricks, mortar, iron, glass, and wood. Arranged in different ways, these few materials can yield a huge variety of structures. We encountered functional groups and the SPHONC in Chapter 3. These components form the four categories of molecules of life. These Big Four biological molecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They can have many roles, from giving an organism structure to be…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • Anorexia nervosa, neurobiology, and family-based treatment

    hen, and only then, patients would choose to resume eating. If they were still alive. Bruch’s observations dictated eating-disorders treatments for decades, treatments that led to spectacularly ineffective results. Only about 35% of people with anorexia recovered; another 20% died, of starvation or suicide; and the rest lived with some level of chronic illness for the rest of their lives. Not a great track record, overall, and especially devastat…

    Authored by on August 10, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • Drill, baby, drill — microbial-style

    …lab director, Anthony Sinskey . What Brigham, Lu, and their colleagues did was convince a soil bacterium called Ralstonia eutropha to turn carbon into gasoline –- specifically, the four-carbon molecules iso-butanol and 3-methyl-1-butanol. Ralstonia eutropha bacteria in culture How’d they do that? It was a simple matter of microbial engineering. As detailed in MIT’s description: … in the microbe’s natural state, when…

    Authored by on September 10, 2012

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