ODRA NOELMembers of the 1,000 Genomes Project this week (July 7) showed that the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of healthy people harbors plenty of pathogenic mutations. Their work was published in PNAS.
Metabolic disease specialist Neal Sondheimer of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said the study “offers the intriguing possibility that maybe everybody has a little bit of something wrong with their mitochondrial DNA and that might play a role in aging.”
WIKIMEDIA, THOMAS LERSCHA team led by investigators at Georgia State University’s Neuroscience Institute reported in Current Biology this week (July 10) evidence to suggest chimpanzees inherit general intelligence from their parents. “This is really major evidence that . . . those estimates of the heritability of human intelligence are probably dead on,” Alexander Weiss, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K. who was not involved in either study, said.
Separately, researchers at University College London and their colleagues published a genome-wide association study (GWAS) involving 2,794 human twin pairs, showing a correlation among genetics, reading, and mathematical abilities. Their analysis appeared in Nature Communications this week (July 8).
WIKIMEDIA, SEWERYN OLKOWICZMice that are malnourished while pregnant can pass down epigenetic markers of such stress to their sons’ sperm, according to a study published in Science this week (July 10). Scientists from the U.K.’s University of Cambridge and their colleagues showed that the germ cells of male mice whose mothers were malnourished while pregnant showed more hypomethylated DNA than did male mice whose mothers received the proper nutrition.
