For 16 years, Carmen Sapienza has been a faculty member of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia. He says that once scientists sequenced the human genome, Mendelian diseases became more completely understood, however, most “people in hospital beds aren’t dying from Mendelian diseases.” There’s clearly a lot more to learn, and in "Sticky Fingers", Sapienza and his colleague Ionel Sandovici (currently at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England), summarize new findings about a protein that may mark “hotspots,” or locations in the genome where most homologous recombination occurs. The protein may even play a role in speciation, they argue in the report (adapted from an article that appeared in F1000 Biology Reports).
Richard Morimoto became interested in proteins from an early age—while in high school, he created a science fair project on memory transfer. At the time, there was scientific literature suggesting that memory was coded in ...
