I’ve known for ages about the enzyme called telomerase, & I’ve known why it’s important – but I have to confess that I’ve never actually thought particularly hard about why we need it. ‘Why’ being in the practical, ‘what’s going on in the cell?’ sense. Lazy thinking on my part, I guess. But today I found […]
Continue readingCategory: genetics
malaria & sickle-cell anaemia
I ran a Schol Bio tutorial out at the uni yesterday & the last exercise we did involved going over a question from last year’s paper. This question looked at sickle-cell disease (SCD), which is seen in individuals who are homozygous for a recessive mutation – on chromosome 11 – that affects the haemoglobin molecule. The mutant […]
Continue reading‘warrior genes’ & media fantasies
A couple of years ago now (before I got into this blogging thing, anyway) there was a brief flurry of media interest over a study that – according to various stories in the press – showed that the Maori population has a higher frequency of a ‘warrior gene’ & that this explained all sorts of […]
Continue readingmore musings on human pheromones
A comment on my post about human pheromones got me thinking a bit more about the topic 🙂 Just how much do we know about these signalling chemicals & our ability to detect them? Many animals use scent as a basis for communication. Many female moths release a sexual pheromone that males can detect from […]
Continue readingmolecular evolution & possible gene therapy
From time to time I’ve heard it said (by those in the creationist camp) that evolution has no relevance to modern medicine. Um… hello? antibiotic resistance in bacteria, anyone? And an understanding of evolution can also be put to good use in examining possibilities for new treatments, as ERV describes in her latest post.
Continue readingfrom chickens to dinosaurs?
In today’s Royal Society news clippings was an item concerning a scientist’s intention to manipulate chickens to get dinosaurs. Intriguing! A quick google search found a number of news items like this one – the researcher concerned believes that by flicking various switches during an embryo chicken’s development, he’ll be able to ‘reproduce the dinosaur […]
Continue readingwhat is ‘normal’?
Well, I had a great time at the Junior Cafe in Tauranga yesterday 🙂 I always like to talk about things that interest me with other equally interested people, & the questions afterwards were really stimulating. As I’ve said before, I enjoy challenging questions because they stimulate my own learning 🙂 Anyway, there was a […]
Continue readingmore to a genome than a string of nucleotides
It’s always bothered me to hear statements along the lines of ‘now that we now the genome of [insert species name here], we know all about [insert species name here].’ That’s so far of the mark, because there is more to the genome than the string of As, Ts, Gs & Cs that make it […]
Continue readingbiotechnological applications & the human gene pool
One of the 2007 Scholarship exam questions sort of links to an earlier post I wrote, on xenotransplantation. It says Human disorders are increasingly being diagnosed and treated using biotechnological applications such as: • Genetic testing, including testing of adults through to pre-birth diagnosis (for example: pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PIGD) of embryos, amniocentesis or chorionic […]
Continue readingfossil poo & moa diets
When I was looking for the original paper for my post on moa feather colour & reductionism, I found a whole lot of other equally interesting stuff. As one does. (It’s just so easy to wander off down some interesting side path & get completely distracted from the original task…) One of those ‘other’ papers […]
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