WIKIMEDIA, GARPENHOLMGenomic analyses of single neurons revealed significant DNA copy number variation, researchers reported this week (October 31). Writing in Science, a team led by investigators at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, also showed that neurons derived in culture from human induced pluripotent stem cells harbored similar copy number variations.
“It’s an exciting paper. It’s a closer look at the single cell genomes of neurons . . . and it identifies another layer of genomic mosaic changes that are occurring amongst neurons,” The Scripps Research Institute’s Jerold Chun, who was not involved in the work, told The Scientist.
WIKIMEDIA, JAMES D. GATHANYA steroid hormone passed from male to female during copulation stimulates the development of eggs in the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, scientists showed in PLOS Biology this week (October 29). Investigators at Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Perugia in Italy describe the molecular pathway that underlies this interaction and identify a receptor and an oogenesis-triggering protein that mediate the male’s manipulation of the female’s physiology.
“[T]he paper provides insights into the complex biological cocktail that the male [mosquito] synthesizes to control the reproduction of the female he mates with,” mosquito physiologist Marc Klowden, a professor emeritus at the University of Idaho who was not involved in the research, told The Scientist.
The researchers suggested their findings could ...
