This is the blog for GW students taking Human Evolutionary Genetics. This site is for posting interesting tidbits on: the patterns and processes of human genetic variation;human origins and migration; molecular adaptations to environment, lifestyle and disease; ancient and forensic DNA analyses; and genealogical reconstructions.
GWHEG figure
Thursday, September 20, 2018
What Americans Think About Gene Editing for Babies
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
What 13,000 Patents Involving the DNA of Sea Life Tell Us About the Future
This article published by the New York Times discusses a paper from Science Advances on patents on genes of living organisms that are located in the ocean. The articles begins the discussion by introducing a recent debate in the United Nations about how the genes of many living organisms are being used and the development of a global legal framework for genetic resources. Private companies in Germany, USA, Japan, Norway, Britain, France, Denmark, Canada, Israel, and the Netherlands own 98% of the patents involving marine organisms’ DNA; and this is leaving to a new kind of global inequality. These genetic prospectors are looking for organisms with exceptional traits that provide the missing portion of a product that will hopefully develop a new or alternative treatment. After various examples, the article concludes with the experimentation of growing of Omega-3 fatty acids on land modifying genetic codes of a Canola plant with DNA from marine microorganisms.
Ana Maria Torres Martinez
Saturday, September 15, 2018
In vivo CRISPR Editing
An paper in Nature focused on the the topic of how scientists are testing in vivo CRISPR editing in mice. In the paper the scientists wanted to test how editing genes and targeting certain genes can help stop certain mutations from forming. There has been no way to test the in vivo editing until now, in which the scientists used two types of mice to perform tests. The scientists are testing the in vivo editing on the mice livers to see if there could be any mutations that could be stopped or slowed down. As well as there was carefully designed guide RNA that were used on the livers, both of the strategies are showing some sort of positive change in the mice's gene and can help start the research for more gene editing.
Thursday, September 13, 2018
The Ever-Shrinking Human Protein-Encoding Genome
A news article posted on Medical News Today on September 3rd reports on a scientific journal article written in Nucleic Acids Research, which hypothesizes that many fewer genes in the human genome code for proteins than previously thought. This process of discovering all the functional genes in the human genome began with the Human Genome project, which at the onset found approximately 40,000 functional human genes, but throughout the project decreased that number to 20-25,000. This study in Nucleic Acids Research cross-referenced three different proteome databases looking for pseudogenes that were identified as functional genes, and found substantial evidence for close to 3,000 and potentially greater than 4,000 pseudogenes. These findings provide strong data for the number of functional human genes settling below 20,000, and most likely lower than that. Fewer functional human genes means that fields such as gene therapy and biomedicine do not have to sort through pseudogenes to find genes responsible for certain human traits or disease, and therefore isolating the function of different human genes a less clunky process.
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Scientists Are Retooling Bacteria to Cure Disease
An article published in The New York Times discusses a paper in Nature which recently confirmed the successful manipulation of DNA in bacteria, engineering them to treat a rare inherited disease called phenylketonuria, or PKU. This type of manipulation of DNA has been done for years but only with mice, this was the first successful try with humans. If this new bacteria continues breaking down a metabolism byproduct, an amino acid called phenylalanine, it would signify a huge change for people suffering from PKU. However, they engineered the phenylalanine genes to “shut down” if they sensed high levels of oxygen around them, this may shut the genes permanently for people who also suffer from hyperoxia (excess of oxygen in body tissues).
Alejandra Paredes
Thursday, September 6, 2018
A Neanderthal - Denisovan 1st generation hybrid?
A recent article in the New York times discuss a paper/letter in Nature titled The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father. Basically, the DNA extracted from a ~90,000 year old bone from a Siberian cave seems to be part Neanderthal and part Denisovan. If true, it's really remarkable that they happen to get a sample from a first generation hominid hybrid. But I wonder if this might be a Neanderthal sample contaminated with Denisovan DNA?
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