How E. coli get the power to cause urinary tract infections
Through a quirk of anatomy, women are especially prone to urinary tract infections, with almost half dealing with one at some point in their lives.
Through a quirk of anatomy, women are especially prone to urinary tract infections, with almost half dealing with one at some point in their lives.
Cell & Microbiology
May 3, 2024
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21
A team of biologists and geneticists at the University of Toronto at Mississauga has found a possible genetic basis for a central player in group connectedness. In their study, published in the journal Nature Communications, ...
Airway hillocks are mysterious, flat-topped structures that were only recently identified within regular lung tissue, and their role in airway biology and pathology has previously been unknown.
Cell & Microbiology
May 1, 2024
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24
Kumamoto University researchers have identified a novel heat shock factor (HSF), designated as HSF5, which plays a crucial role in the completion of meiosis and the activation of genes essential for sperm formation. This ...
Cell & Microbiology
May 1, 2024
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16
For ages now, plants have been the primary source of nutrition for animals and mankind. Additionally, plants are used for the extraction of various medicinal and therapeutic compounds. However, their indiscriminate use, along ...
Biotechnology
May 1, 2024
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54
It is possible to engineer increased mesophyll conductance in plants according to new research from the University of Illinois. Mesophyll conductance plays a key role in photosynthesis and refers to the ease with which CO2 ...
Biotechnology
Apr 30, 2024
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1
Researchers at the University of Vienna, along with collaborators from France, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S., have achieved a breakthrough in understanding how genetic drivers influence the evolution of a specific photosynthesis ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 30, 2024
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159
Unlocking biological information from complex single-cell genomic data has just become easier and more precise, thanks to the innovative scLENS tool developed by the Biomedical Mathematics Group within the IBS Center for ...
Biotechnology
Apr 30, 2024
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1
A team led by Purdue University soybean geneticist Jianxin Ma has developed a new biotechnological tool for the domestication of desirable traits from wild soybeans, such as resistance to leafhopper insect pests. The use ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Apr 30, 2024
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80
Genome sequencing technology provides thousands of new plant genomes annually. In agriculture, researchers merge this genomic information with observational data (measuring various plant traits) to identify correlations between ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 26, 2024
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40
A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. A modern working definition of a gene is "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions " . In common usage, the term gene often refers to what is known more accurately as an allele.
The notion of a gene has evolved with the science of genetics, which began when Gregor Mendel noticed that biological variations are inherited from parent organisms as specific, discrete traits. The biological entity responsible for defining traits was termed a gene, but the biological basis for inheritance remained unknown until DNA was identified as the genetic material in the 1940s. All organisms have many genes corresponding to many different biological traits, some of which are immediately visible, such as eye color or number of limbs, and some of which are not, such as blood type or increased risk for specific diseases, or the thousands of basic biochemical processes that comprise life.
In cells, a gene is a portion of DNA that contains both "coding" sequences that determine what the gene does, and "non-coding" sequences that determine when the gene is active (expressed). When a gene is active, the coding and non-coding sequences are copied in a process called transcription, producing an RNA copy of the gene's information. This piece of RNA can then direct the synthesis of proteins via the genetic code. In other cases, the RNA is used directly, for example as part of the ribosome. The molecules resulting from gene expression, whether RNA or protein, are known as gene products, and are responsible for the development and functioning of all living things.
In more technical terms, a gene is a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, and is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions. The physical development and phenotype of organisms can be thought of as a product of genes interacting with each other and with the environment. A concise definition of a gene, taking into account complex patterns of regulation and transcription, genic conservation and non-coding RNA genes, has been proposed by Gerstein et al.: "A gene is a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products".
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