Science News

In recent years, scientists have decoded the DNA of humans and a menagerie of creatures but none with genes as complex as a stalk of corn, the latest genome to be unraveled. A team of scientists led by The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published the completed corn genome in the Nov. 20 journal Science, an accomplishment that will speed efforts to develop better crop varieties to meet the world's growing demands for food, livestock feed and fuel. "Seed companies and maize geneticists will pounce on this data to find their favorite genes," says senior author Richard K. ... Read Full Story

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life. Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the basic structure for uracil, part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is central to protein synthesis, but has many other roles. "We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in ... Read Full Story

For a long time I've wondered if there's a connection between early trauma/stress and the development of Morgellons. I've been wanting to start a thread on this, and was talking to a friend about this yesterday (both of us "qualify", and many others that I have spoken to do as well). One of the things that was confusing to me is how could this occur? What would be the mechanism(s)? So just now I saw an article in "The Scientist" and it gives a clue: Early stress alters epigenome Posted by Jef Akst [Entry posted at 8th November 2009 06:00 PM GMT] View comments(6) ... Read Full Story

An international team of researchers has decoded the genome of the domestic horse Equus caballus, revealing a genome structure with remarkable similarities to humans and more than one million genetic differences across a variety of horse breeds. In addition to shedding light on a key part of the mammalian branch of the evolutionary tree, the work also provides a critical starting point for mapping disease genes in horses. "Horses and humans suffer from similar illnesses, so identifying the genetic culprits in horses promises to deepen our knowledge of disease in both organisms," said senior author Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, scientific director of vertebrate genome biology at ... Read Full Story

A team of Harvard chemists led by X. Sunney Xie has developed a new microscopic technique for seeing, in color, molecules with undetectable fluorescence. The room-temperature technique allows researchers to identify previously unseen molecules in living organisms and offers broad applications in biomedical imaging and research. The scientists' results are published in the Oct. 22 issue of Nature. Partial funding for the project was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Fluorescence is a phenomenon in which an electron in a molecule absorbs energy from light and moves to a higher energy level or excited state. The energy of the light is contained in ... Read Full Story