Articles tagged Model Organisms
(73 results)

After 60 years of mystery, researchers have identified the pathogen responsible for White Fat Cell Disease. Water fleas of the genus Daphnia have long been critical tools for studying the ecology and evolution of host-pathogen interactions, but one of their natural pathogens has remained mysterious for more than six decades. In the 1950s, Daphnia magna…

Yeast and zebrafish are among the lab organisms being recruited to the search for rare disease cures. Rare diseases are not so rare. About 300 million people worldwide live with the more than 7000 individual diseases that are designated “rare” by the US government. But because each of these affect so few individuals, the usual…

Biologists rely on animal models to answer important questions that can’t be addressed with cells in a dish. Often, these animals are deliberately inbred; a less diverse population of animals means that data obtained from experiments with these animals will be less noisy and easier to interpret, so fewer animals are needed for meaningful results.…

Consider the papercut—a minor injury best known for the disproportionate amount of pain it can cause. That a wound so inconsequential can sting so terribly is curious, but perhaps even more surprising is the fact that it heals at all. To heal a wound, even one as trivial as a papercut, the cells involved in…

Beer, doughnuts, and genetics textbooks have one thing in common: they were all made possible by collaborations between humans and yeast. Our fungal ally Saccharomyces cerevisiae resides not only in breweries, bakeries, and laboratories, but also sometimes in our own bodies—where, on rare occasions, it betrays us. S. cerevisiae is increasingly being reported as an…

Why study human diseases in frogs? For starters, 79% of genes implicated in human disease have orthologs in the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis. Frogs also produce hundreds of embryos that can be grown in a dish, meaning they can be manipulated in ways that are impractical on a large scale in mammals. For example,…

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that Philip Hieter is the recipient of the 2018 George W. Beadle Award, bestowed in honor of his outstanding contributions to the genetics research community. Hieter is Professor of Medical Genetics in the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. Geneticists across the…

As night fell, astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan watched a plant’s leaves, symmetrically arranged side-by-side on a stem, clamp shut. It was 1729, and he was studying the dramatic nocturnal movement of Mimosa pudica. Strangely, he found that the plant behaved the same way even when it wasn’t exposed to natural cycles of light…

The unassuming fruit fly has paved the way for another big scientific win: on October 2nd, the Nobel Assembly awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young for their discoveries of the molecular mechanisms behind circadian rhythms. These biologists have spent their careers studying…

For many of the roughly 300 million people around the world with rare diseases, the road to diagnosis can be long, painful, expensive, and disheartening. Around eighty percent of very infrequently seen undiagnosed diseases are estimated to have a genetic basis, but even with modern DNA sequencing techniques, the causes are often unclear. In these…

Palm fronds crunch under a researcher’s foot as she hikes through a rainforest in Madagascar looking for a spot to release a tiny, omnivorous ball of fur with bulging eyes—a mouse lemur. This creature, the smallest type of primate, is an important research subject: it has just yielded a blood sample, skin cells, and an…