The decision to vote is partly genetic, say researchers James H. Fowler and Christopher T. Dawes, of the University of California, San Diego. Their research, just published in the Journal of Politics, identifies a link between two specific genes and political participation. The results suggest that, contrary to decades of conventional wisdom, family upbringing may […]
While the nature-nurture argument about homosexuality continues to be debated, a team of neurobiologists from the University of Illinois at Chicago have discovered that sexual orientation in fruit flies is controlled by a previously unknown regulator of synapse strength. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers were able to use either genetic manipulation or drugs to […]
A new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B tries to uncover why several genes with strong associations to schizophrenia have evolved rapidly thanks to positive selection during human evolution. The international team of geneticists found a higher prevalence of positive selection on genes known to be associated with the disorder than a […]
Writing in the journal Cell, three Boston University biomedical engineers report they have created a genetic dimmer switch that can be used to turn on, shut off, or partially activate a gene’s function. The switch – developed by James Collins, Charles Cantor and Tara Deans – could help advance the field of synthetic biology, which […]
It looks like it may be back to the drawing board for many of the new gene therapy treatments being developed around the world. Professor Alexandre Reymond, from the Centre for Integrative Genomics in Switzerland, told attendees at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics that current gene knock-out and knock-in models […]
Today, details of an important new way of determining proof of natural selection at the single gene level were published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS). The new statistical method will replace what is known as the standard neutral model, which many scientists say is less than ideal. According to them, the commonly used […]
The 1918 Spanish flu killed an estimated 40 million people, and unlike other flu strains that usually impact the very young and elderly, the Spanish flu hit otherwise healthy adults particularly hard. Now, many in the scientific community believe it is only a matter of time before a global pandemic of avian flu strikes, so […]
In the August issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, Celia Greenwood and colleagues present evidence for a major genetic component to TB susceptibility. Tuberculosis (TB) is currently a major public health problem worldwide. Although there are millions of new cases of TB each year, not all individuals exposed to TB become infected, nor […]
