Hasta La Gadget!

It’s probably not something you think about a lot, but we all leave pieces of ourselves everywhere we go. Flakes of skin here, a renegade hair there, the occasional loogie, they all leave some of your DNA behind. And while it normally goes untouched, someone could use it to say, 3D-print an approximation of your face. More »

Everyone knows that a drop of blood or strand of hair is all the police need to identify suspect’s DNA. But now scientists from Harvard have gone a step further: they can sequence an entire genome from a single cell. More »

The placebo effect seems to make little sense: get ill, take a dummy pill, and you’ll recover in much the same way as someone taking real drugs. While there have been many theories bandied about over the years to explain how it works, new evidence suggests that it may be genetic. More »

As a species, we’ve spent a lot of time learning how the human brain works, but we’ve had to go without a true, thorough map of how genes manifest themselves in our craniums; previous maps have been limited to the simpler minds of mice. The Allen Institute for Brain Science is now known to have solved that mystery by recently finishing an extensive, detailed 3D atlas of genetic expression within our own brain tissue. Accomplishing the feat required no small amount of resources, including the definition of 900 subdivisions, conducting over 62,000 gene expression probes and producing the MRI scans of two and a half brains, but the result is a potentially vital tool for neuroscience and education. Curious web users can see a visual map of gene expression based on virtually any criteria they need, whether it’s a physical region of the brain, a disease type or the exact gene they’d like to track down. For many, the best news about the map may simply be that it’s free and public: anyone with enough experience in genetics can learn more about what makes the mind tick through their browsers, and what they find might just lead to new discoveries.

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Allen Institute completes gene expression map of the human brain in high-resolution 3D originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve known little of the genetic sequences of our precursors, despite having found many examples of their remains: the requirement for two strands in traditional DNA sequencing isn’t much help when we’re usually thankful to get just one. The Max Planck Institute has devised a new, single-strand technique that may very well fill in the complete picture. Binding specific molecules to a strand, so enzymes can copy the sequence, has let researchers make at least one pass over 99.9 percent of the genome of a Siberian girl from roughly 80,000 years ago — giving science the most complete genetic picture of any human ancestor to date, all from the one bone you see above. The gene map tells us that the brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl was part of a splinter population known as the Denisovans that sat in between Neanderthals and ourselves, having forked the family tree hundreds of thousands of years before today. It also shows that there’s a small trace of Denisovans and their Neanderthal roots in modern East Asia, which we would never have known just by staring at fossils. Future discoveries could take years to leave an impact, but MPI may have just opened the floodgates of knowledge for our collective history.

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Max Planck Institute sequences genome of Siberian girl from 80,000 years ago, smashes DNA barriers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Sep 2012 01:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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