Plants are very good at producing oxygen that we all need in order to breath, but what about clearing the air of harmful chemicals? Past research has revealed that plants do a bit of housekeeping when it comes to cleaning the air of certain compounds but researchers wondered if they could help boost that function with a genetic tweak.

In new research published in Environmental Science & Technology, researchers explain how they were able to give a common house plant more power to clean the air around it, and it’s all thanks to DNA from a mammal.

Ten people who mattered in science in 2018. Picks include a rogue gene-editor, a wunderkind physicist and a DNA detective who helped catch a serial killer.

A team of scientists has developed a method that yields, for the first time, visualization of a gene amplifications and deletions known as copy number variants in single cells.

Significantly, the breakthrough, reported in the journal PLoS Biology, allows early detection of rare genetic events providing high resolution analysis of the tempo of evolution. The method may provide a new way of studying mutations in pathogens and human cancers.

“Evolution and disease are driven by mutational events in DNA,” explains David Gresham, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Biology and the study’s senior author. “However, in populations of cells these events currently cannot be identified until many cells contain the same mutation. Our method detects these rare events right after they have happened, allowing us to follow their trajectory as the population evolves.”

Continue reading “Scientists develop method to visualize a genetic mutation” »

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer for women yet the leading cause of cancer-related death in developing countries, an unfortunate statistic that highlights the importance of access to screening. Through a comprehensive trial involving thousands of subjects, a newly designed test has been found to greatly outperform current screening methods in terms of both cost and accuracy, while also shedding new light on the mechanics at play.

🤔🧐🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

The effort is part of a $45 million program across all the branches of the armed forces to figure out military applications for genetic engineering.

Society and the government aren’t sure what to make of new techniques for animal breeding.

https://www.bustle.com/p/7-creepy-things-a-dead-body-can-do-…e-13550864

There’s a positive correlation of assisted reproductive technologies with arterial hypertension. Epigenetics and hormone treatments with IVF are probable causes.

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been shown to induce premature vascular aging in apparently healthy children. In mice, ART-induced premature vascular aging evolves into arterial hypertension. Given the young age of the human ART group, long-term sequelae of ART-induced alterations of the cardiovascular phenotype are unknown.

This study hypothesized that vascular alterations persist in adolescents and young adults conceived by ART and that arterial hypertension possibly represents the first detectable clinically relevant endpoint in this group.

Continue reading “Association of Assisted Reproductive Technologies With Arterial Hypertension During Adolescence” »

For decades after the discovery of DNA, researchers mostly thought of genetics in terms of genes, the pieces or sequences of DNA that encode instructions for building proteins in cells. Then scientists discovered that genes make up just 2 percent of our DNA and that most genetic complexity stems from the vast non-gene code, which influences when genes are turned on or off. Further, half of that non-gene code was found to come from insertions of viral DNA. Consequently, say the authors, genetic variation, and the potential for disease-causing mistakes, occurs in transposons as well as in genes.

New laboratory techniques can identify which of our genes are influenced by DNA snippets that are left behind in our genetic code by viruses, a new study finds.