gene duplication
edyong | July 16, 2009Compare the elegant grace of a running wolf with the comical shuffle of a waddling dachshund, and you begin to understand what millennia of domestication and artificial selection can do to an animal. As dachshunds develop, the growing tips of their limb bones harden early, stunting their growth and leading to a type of dwarfism called chondrodysplasia. The same applies to at least 19 modern breeds including corgis, Pekingese and basset hounds, all of which have very short, curved legs.
These breeds highlight the domestic dog's status as the most physically diverse of mammals. Now, a team of…
edyong | March 23, 2009Sixty-five million years ago, life on Earth was sorely tested. One or more catastrophic events including a massive asteroid strike and increased volcanic activity, created wildfires on a global scale and dust clouds that cut the planet's surface off from the sun's vital light. The majority of animal species went extinct including, most famously, the dinosaurs. The fate of the planet's plants is less familiar, but 60% of those also perished. What separated the survivors from the deceased? How did some species cross this so-called "K/T boundary"?
Jeffrey Fawcett form the Flanders Institute for…
edyong | March 5, 2009The world of genetics is filled with stories that are as gripping as the plot of any thriller. Take the IRGM gene - its saga, played out over millions of years, has all the makings of a classic drama. Act One: setting the scene. By duplicating and diverging, this gene thrived in the cells of most mammals as a trinity of related versions that played vital roles in the immune system.
Act Two: tragedy strikes. About 50 million years ago, in the ancestors of today's apes and monkeys, the entire IRGM cluster was practically deleted, leaving behind a sole survivor. Things took a turn for the worse…
edyong | February 11, 2009This is the sixth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial.
Physically, we are incredibly different from our ape cousins but genetically, it's a different story. We famously share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Our proteins are virtually identical and our chromosomes have more or less the same structure. At the level of the nucleotide (the "letters" that build strands of DNA), little has happened during ape evolution. These letters have been changing at a considerably slower rate than in our relatives than in other…