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Science & Publishing
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Science & Publishing
Primers: Make friends with a new model organism
We hope everyone at The Allied Genetics Conference this week will take the opportunity to attend some presentations outside their “home” genetics community. But we realize that sometimes listening to talks in a new field can feel like visiting a foreign country, with its own language, unfamiliar customs, and insider jokes. If only you had…
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Science & Publishing
New in G3: Drosophila doublesex, Shetland pony SHOX, and SNP-SNP interactions
Check out the July issue of G3! ForestPMPlot: A Flexible Tool for Visualizing Heterogeneity Between Studies in Meta-analysis Eun Yong Kang, Yurang Park, Xiao Li, Ayellet V. Segrè, Buhm Han, and Eleazar Eskin G3 July 2016 6:1793-1798; Early Online May 18, 2016 doi:10.1534/g3.116.029439 Abstract | Full Text | Full Text (PDF) Sex Differences in Drosophila…
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Science & Publishing
July GENETICS Highlights
Check out the July issue of GENETICS by looking at the highlights or the full table of contents! This Month’s Centennial Articles Alfred Sturtevant and George Beadle untangle inversions, pp. 1001-1003 R. Scott Hawley and Barry Ganetzky R. Scott Hawley and Barry Ganetzky introduce Sturtevant and Beadle’s 1936 Classic that explained why inversion heterozygosity in the Drosophila X…
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Science & Publishing
Two-faced protein both speeds and slows cell cycle
Although some proteins have a single career, many—like Dis3—lead a double life. In the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, loss-of-function mutations in dis3 cause defects in mitosis, implying that Dis3 normally supports cell cycle progression. But perplexingly, results in humans suggest that Dis3 normally slows cell cycle progression: mutations that partially disable dis3 contribute to the development…
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Science & Publishing
‘Omics’ data improves breast cancer survival prediction
Precise predictions of whether a tumor is likely to spread would help clinicians and patients choose the best course of treatment. But current methods fall short of the precision needed. New research in this month’s issue of GENETICS reveals that profiling primary tumor samples using genomic technologies can improve the accuracy of breast cancer survival predictions…
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Science & Publishing
Learning & Doing: GSA Awardee Bill Wood interview in GENETICS
So much is easily accessible on the internet now, there’s no need to pack students’ heads with information; what’s important is that we teach students how to learn on their own. —William B. Wood Bill Wood has been a pioneer in the reform of science teaching. Along with his many scientific accomplishments, Wood’s leadership has been…
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Science & Publishing
Selfish self-fertilization hampers adaptation
When finding a mate is difficult, self-fertilization offers a tempting solution by increasing the number of offspring an individual can produce. But although “selfing” provides a stopgap solution when mates are scarce, it is frequently an evolutionary dead end; when environmental conditions change, species with high selfing rates seem prone to extinction. In an article…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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.…