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Frog immune responses to a global threat
Dramatic global declines in amphibians have been linked to the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, but some species are more vulnerable than others. In the latest issue of G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, as part of the GSA Journals’ Genetics of Immunity collection, Ellison et al. examined the transcriptome of the highly susceptible Panama Golden Frog after exposure to…
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Does neural crest development drive domestication syndrome?
In Stellenbosch, South Africa, in the shade of the university botanical gardens, Adam Wilkins and Richard Wrangham drank coffee and worked their way through a list. Tameness. Smaller muzzles. Smaller teeth. Patches of white fur. Floppy ears. In early 2011, Wilkins, Perspectives editor at GENETICS, and Wrangham, primatologist at Harvard, were both spending the semester…
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Genetic maps, 100 years later
One feverish night, just over 100 years ago, an undergraduate in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s lab created the first genetic map. Realizing that the frequency of crossing over could be used to work out out the linear order of genes on a chromosome, that student, Alfred Sturtevant, published his map in 1913 and laid the foundation…
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Turning to the Worm
When Scott Alper and colleagues looked for candidate regulators of mammalian innate immunity based on gene expression data, the hit rate was only around 2%. By using a comparative genomics approach — starting with an RNAi screen in Caenorhabditis elegans — their hit rate rose to nearly 30%. In a new GENETICS article, published as…