Image: Courtesy of Elliott Marguiles PIPS ON PARADE: Researchers used a MultiPipMaker to show the alignments, expressed as percent identity plots, between a human reference sequence and several other species. This is a 20 kb region surrounding exon 2 of the MET gene. Gap-free alignable segments are represented as horizontal lines along the human reference sequence; the line's height represents the identity of that alignment. Aristotle envisioned humanity as the pinnacle of a "Great Chai
And Future Ambitions Editor's Note: For the past four years, former National Institutes of Health researcher J. Craig Venter has been a major figure in the turbulent debates and scientific discoveries surrounding the study of genes and genomes. Events heated up in 1991, when NIH attempted to patent gene fragments, which were isolated using Venter's expressed sequence tag (EST)/complementary DNA (cDNA) approach for discovering human genes (M.A. Adams et al., Science, 252:1651-6, 1991). NIH's mo
Ryan Layer, The Conversation | May 27, 2022 | 5 min read
Tumors contain thousands of genetic changes, but only a few are actually cancer-causing. A quicker way to identify these driver mutations could lead to more targeted cancer treatments.
The Scientist and Jerome Siegel | Mar 1, 2016 | 10+ min read
Once believed to be unique to birds and mammals, sleep is found across the metazoan kingdom. Some animals, it seems, can’t live without it, though no one knows exactly why.