Tag Archives: genetics

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23andWe – genomics goes social

23andmeDrawing on his experiences with 23andMe‘s personal genetics service, Kevin Kelly has made a couple of interesting observations. Focusing on what happens when the logic of crowdsourcing is applied to biotechnology, he comments on

how fast and how eager users have been to share their genetic data. We’ve been conditioned by anxious media reports to believe that people want to hoard their very personal genetic profile, in fear of what would happen if governments, corporations, insurance companies and the neighbors were to see it. But in fact like a lot of other things that have made it online, genetic information only increases in value when shared.

Experts thought only a fringe minority would dare share their genes, but swapping genetic info will mostly likely be the norm for a generation that shares everything else. Sharing your genetic info with family members, relatives, and even apparent strangers (who must be related somehow) is exciting, and certainly educational.

[Story via The Quantified Self. Image by CrashIntoTheSun]

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The Colors of Antiquity

A Dragonfly FossilCan you imagine what the extinct birds of millions of years ago looked like? How big were they? Do they look like the birds of today? What colors were they? The first two questions are easily answerable by fossil records, but the third one is a bit more difficult, unless you have a time machine handy. But US researchers believe they’ve come a bit closer to solving the problem:

Writing in the journal Biology Letters, US researchers reveal how ancient feathers found in Brazil displayed “striking” bands of black and white. Previously, fossil experts could only guess at the range of hues exhibited by ancient birds and some dinosaurs.

To find an answer they had to look at behavioural and genetic clues:

There are particular cells that cluster into the dark areas of modern birds called melanosomes. Somehow the melanosomes are retained and replaced during the preservation process and hence you preserve a very life like representation of the colour banding in the fossils.

And also:

The Yale team believe they could identify brown, red, buff and even iridescent colours. The technique may be applied to other creatures to reveal the colour of fur or even eyes, the team believes.

This news reminds me of an SF story called The Color of A Brontosaurus, which speculates somewhat on the same subject matter.

[story via BBC News] [image by kevinzim]

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Environmentalism as religion

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A late but strong candidate for controversial discussion-point of the month appeared yesterday in the form of visionary physicist Freeman Dyson’s article for the New York Review of Books, in which he detours into a discussion of global warming skepticism.

There’s a lot of interesting points in there, and the replies and rebuttals are coming thick and fast, but what I wanted to focus on was Dyson’s portrayal of environmentalism as a secular religion, because it turned up in my feed reader at almost exactly the same time as another article which claims software-based research suggests religion is an inevitable consequence of evolution.

If that’s the case, one wonders if religion is merely a developmental phase that we’ll eventually grow out of? One thing’s for certain – Creationists probably won’t appreciate the irony of being told their faith is a by-product of a process they don’t believe in.

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I can haz bioluminesenz? Cloned red fluorescent cats

Bioluminescent-cats

It doesn’t get much more science fictional than this – South Korean scientists have genetically engineered white kittens that glow red under ultraviolet light. [Image cribbed from linked article]

Bioluminescent gene hackery isn’t a new idea – MetaFilter has the links for the history, starting way back (!) in 1994 with E. coli and roundworm cells – but this is a new level in cute for genetic science.

[tags]genetics, cloning, cats, bioluminescence[/tags]
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One step closer to the return of the woolly mammoth?

Woolly MammothAn international research team has discovered that they can obtain good DNA samples from the shafts of mammoth hair. Apparently keratin, the protein out of which hair is made, acts as a kind of plastic, preserving the DNA from contamination by marauding bacteria. The research could help scientists figure out why the mammoths went extinct at the end of the last ice age, and the technique could be applied to samples from other species that went extinct in relatively recent times, even samples that have been tucked away in museum drawers for decades. (Via National Geographic News; tip from The Walrus Said.)

Of course, what everyone really wants to know is, can we use this DNA to bring woolly mammoths back?

Short answer: maybe, but you won’t see them in Siberia’s nascent Pleistocene Park any time soon. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]genetics, DNA, cloning, extinction[/tags]