Articles tagged Genetics Journal
(310 results)

Memory is a complex neurological process, and understanding its mechanics rarely yields clear-cut answers. So far, research on the memory-implicated gene HDAC4 has been no exception—in fact, HDAC4’s effects on long-term memory seem completely contradictory. Increased HDAC4 protein in the cell nucleus causes memory deficits, and consistent with this, a human mutation that resulted in…

Lurking in colonies of pathogenic bacteria are drug-resistant mutants. If the colony is exposed to antibiotics, these resistant mutants may survive, but they still face the challenge of recolonizing the host. Their success in this task depends on their diversity; a diverse population is more likely to harbor mutants that can withstand a second threat,…

Got a hot manuscript or a burning question for a GENETICS or G3 editor? Just want to talk about scholarly publishing in general? Here’s how you can track down an editor at The Allied Genetics Conference this week: Watch out for ribbons GENETICS and G3 Editors will be wearing silver “Editor” ribbons on their name…

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…

Sometimes, the most useful scientific tool is a unique perspective. Leonid Kruglyak is a remarkable example of that fact. He originally trained as a physicist, and his quantitative background was foundational to his successful career in genetics and genomics. Kruglyak’s work focuses on the transmission of complex traits and the genetic basis of phenotypic variation. He…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…