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Science & Publishing

  • Molecular model of penicillin, the first antibiotic discovered. Later, antimicrobial peptides were also found to have antibiotic properties. By Science Museum London / Science and Society Picture Library [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
    Science & Publishing

    How bacteria dodge new antibiotic candidates

    Antibiotics, a vital tool for fighting infections, were originally products of nature—the first antibiotic was serendipitously discovered in mold contaminating a bacterial culture. As antibiotic resistance becomes an increasingly serious threat, scientists are attempting to wring another type of pathogen-fighting drug from the wild: antimicrobial peptides. Antimicrobial peptides, or AMPs, are found in almost every…

  • Science & Publishing

    Fecal alchemy: Turning poop into genomics gold

    When it comes to genotyping technology, poop genetics is stuck in the 1990s. While most geneticists are now awash in genome-scale data from thousands of individuals, those who depend on  fecal and other non-invasively collected samples still rely on old-school, boutique panels of a dozen or so genetic markers. But feces — along with fur,…

  • Marine sticklebacks schooling. Courtesy of Anna Greenwood.
    Science & Publishing

    Fish with robot friends: linking genes to behavior

    The relative contributions of nature and nurture to behavior are a perennial source of dispute. That there is a genetic component is clear, but frustratingly, only a handful of specific genes are known to directly influence behavior in vertebrates. In the June issue of GENETICS, Greenwood et al. describe how they pinned down one of…

  • The pharynx in the wild type worm (top) is shorter than the pharynx in the mutant worm (bottom). Image credit: modified from figure 1 in Shibata et al.
    Science & Publishing

    Stretchy cells underlie organ development

    Animals’ complex body plans come at a cost: their development is elaborate and must be delicately controlled. One critical aspect of development is size and shape control—every organ needs to fit in its place. The process requires the orchestration of a dizzying number of pathways, and understanding even a single component is far from trivial.…

  • Science & Publishing

    Jamborees of GENETICS Authors

    By guest authors Robert K. Herman, Gabriela Huelgas-Morales, and David Greenstein This summer, GSA is throwing a genetics shindig–The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC)–to bring geneticists from multiple disciplines together to promote interaction and cross-fertilization among fields. In a way, this meeting extends a current trend: GENETICS authors have been aggregating for some time. Those of us…

  • Neanderthal museum
    Science & Publishing

    Inbred Neanderthals left humans a genetic burden

    The Neanderthal genome included harmful mutations that made the hominids around 40% less reproductively fit than modern humans, according to estimates published in the latest issue of GENETICS. Non-African humans inherited some of this genetic burden when they interbred with Neanderthals, though much of it has been lost over time. The results suggest that these harmful…

  • Science & Publishing

    June GENETICS Highlights

    Check out the June issue of GENETICS by looking at the highlights or the full table of contents! This Month’s Centennial Articles Joshua Lederberg on bacterial recombination, pp. 613–614 Mark Johnston GENETICS Editor-in-Chief Mark Johnston introduces Joshua Lederberg’s GENETICS Classic Gene recombination and linked segregations in Escherichia coli, which describes the first genetic analysis of bacteria. Lederberg’s discovery that…

  • Horse apo ferritin (PDB: 4v1w).
    Science & Publishing

    How worms that pump iron get fat

    Despite its reputation as an innocent essential mineral, excessive iron intake can be poisonous, and maintaining the proper amount within our cells requires a molecular balancing act among several biochemical pathways. Even at levels that are not overtly toxic, iron overload in humans has been associated with an increased risk of obesity and related conditions,…

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    New in G3: Cotton, Candida, and Chlamydomonas

    Check out the June issue of G3! Investigations Sdt97: A Point Mutation in the 5′ Untranslated Region Confers Semidwarfism in Rice Jiping Tong, Zhengshu Han, Aonan Han, Xuejun Liu, Shiyong Zhang, Binying Fu, Jun Hu, Jingping Su, Shaoqing Li, Shengjun Wang, and Yingguo Zhu G3 June 2016 6:1491-1502; Early Online April 29, 2016 doi:10.1534/g3.116.028720 Abstract…

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    Credit where it isn’t due

    We biologists can be a credit-hungry lot. Getting a paper into press that shows we were first to make a discovery best satisfies our appetite for affirmation. But has the trend to slice each piece of credit ever finer gone too far? (While perhaps easy for a senior member of the field like me to…

  • By wiredforlego via Flickr.
    Science & Publishing

    Runaway amplification: 800 copies and counting

    Massive amplification of genes is a desperate strategy taken by stressed populations adapting to an environment that has become inhospitable. Such amplifications can give an underperforming gene a much-needed boost in productivity simply by increasing its copy number. But counterintuitively, research reported in the May issue of G3 implies these amplifications may arise even in…