News by Subject Biology

Although cats have lived alongside humans for millennia, it remains a dogs' world. This bias has historically bled into science as well. It's time for cats to get their day, argues veterinary medicine expert Leslie Lyons (@LyonsLab) in a Forum published July 28 in the journal Trends in Genetics. Cats, she says, have the potential to be a valuable model organism for geneticists, as the feline genome is ordered similarly to humans.

Researchers have identified a rare class of genetic differences transmitted from parents without autism to their affected children with autism and determined that they are most prominent in "multiplex" families with more than one family member on the spectrum. These findings are reported in Recent ultra-rare inherited variants implicate new autism candidate risk genes, a new study published in Nature Genetics.

Scientists around the world are collaborating on a project that is changing the way they trace the evolutionary history of flowering plants. By using new technology allowing them to rapidly retrieve and compare DNA sequences from among any of the 300,000 species of flowering plants, scientists are unraveling the 140-million-year history of the largest group of land plants on Earth and providing a framework to protect vulnerable species and populations into the future.

A genetic analysis of fruit in the mandarin family has unraveled a complex journey from the mountainous region of southern China to the markets of Okinawa, says researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital study highlights the power of comprehensive whole genome, whole exome and RNA sequencing to better understand and treat each patient's cancer.

The body's first encounter with the coronavirus happens in the nose and throat. New work in Cell suggests that responses in this early battleground help determine who will develop severe COVID-19 and who will have only mild or no illness. It used single-cell RNA sequencing of all the cell types recovered from nasal swabs of people with and without COVID-19.

Researchers at Washington State University have recently identified a DNA region known as VNTR2-1 that appears to drive the activity of the telomerase gene, which has been shown to prevent aging in certain types of cells. Knowing how the telomerase gene is regulated and activated and why it is only active in certain cell types could someday be the key to understanding how humans age and how to stop the spread of cancer.

In the first wealth and longevity study to incorporate siblings and twin pair data, researchers from Northwestern University analyzed the midlife net worth of adults (mean age 46.7 years) and their mortality rates 24 years later. They discovered those with greater wealth at midlife tended to live longer.

Mount Sinai researchers have developed a therapeutic agent that shows high effectiveness in vitro at disrupting a biological pathway that helps cancer survive, according to a paper published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, in July.