Amber Dance Author Profile | The Scientist Magazine®

Nutrition Researchers Can Determine What You’ve Been Eating

Amber Dance | Dec 1, 2020 | 10+ min read

The study of diet, long plagued by inaccuracies in self reports, is entering a new age of precision with the methods of metabolomics.

Infographic: Deciphering Diet from Blood and Urine Samples

Amber Dance | Dec 1, 2020 | 1 min read

Nutrition researchers are beginning to use metabolomics to determine how healthy subjects’ diets are, and even to reveal specific properties of the foods they eat.

Infographic: Synthetases and the Evolution of Circulatory Systems

Amber Dance | Jun 1, 2020 | 3 min read

Aminoacyl tRNA synthetases picked up new protein domains that participate in vasculature formation around the same time that organisms evolved key adaptations in the circulatory system.

Protein Synthesis Enzymes Have Evolved Additional Jobs

Amber Dance | Jun 1, 2020 | 10+ min read

Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, which help translate the genetic code into protein, also function in angiogenesis, fat metabolism, and more.

How Manipulating Rodent Memories Can Elucidate Neurological Function

Amber Dance | May 1, 2020 | 10+ min read

Strategies to make lab animals forget, remember, or experience false recollections probe how memory works, and may inspire treatments for neurological diseases.

Infographic: Messing with a Mouse’s Memory

Amber Dance | May 1, 2020 | 3 min read

Researchers have developed ways to manipulate neurons involved in a particular memory to make mice recall an experience or to remember something that never happened.

Infographic: How Some X-Chromosome Genes Escape Inactivation

Amber Dance | Mar 1, 2020 | 2 min read

About one-quarter of the hundreds of genes on the inactivated X chromosome in XX cells manage to escape that silencing, at least some of the time.

Genes that Escape Silencing on the Second X Chromosome May Drive Disease

Amber Dance | Mar 1, 2020 | 10+ min read

When X-linked genes evade silencing on the “inactive” chromosome in XX cells, some protect women from diseases such as cancer, but others seem to promote conditions such as autoimmunity.