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Mrs Roy is taking part in an early-stage study of the ProSavin therapy

Following her treatment Sheila Roy has been able to carry out tasks like writing, something she has been unable to do for 15 years

Gene therapies hold great promise for people with Parkinson’s in the future, as they could mean an end to the daily regime of drugs that most people with the condition currently face.

epigenetic changes with alterations in the structure of the DNA and its associated proteins, histones, which affects the way that genes can behave in later life.

Only microscopic amounts of DNA are left on the skeletons, including all the bacteria that lived on the animals. No usable DNA is therefore often found in bone, but mammoth hair is plentiful. Shampooed and bleached and digested, the hair, even at 18,000 years old, can have 90% of the DNA left. The genome shows 4 different "races" of this species. Research has also shown the recreated blood of mammoth. It doesn't decrease its oxygen capacity at the low temperatures the mammoth had to endure. That increased oxygen-offloading ability was one of the essential physiological changes evolved especially for this species, just like the Yuka kidney.

Cloning the mammoth has been an aim of Japanese scientists for several years. They discovered almost intact bone marrow from a thigh bone in Yakutsk and hope to use a female elephant for what is obviously more than a simple experiment within the next 5 years.

echnique" and NDRI had used the same technology to clone two buffalo calves on its Karnal campus.

athletic frogs tended to have faster-changing genomes.

During exercise, the circulatory system provides blood and oxygen to the tissues that are needed most

When physical activity has stopped, the rush of blood and oxygen when circulation is restored to those tissues produces a burst of free radicals that can cause wear and tear on DNA, eventually causing genetic changes that -- if they affect the DNA of cells that make eggs or sperm -- can be passed to future generations.

now that doctors know that the SHANK 1 gene is involved and it can be tested for, they'll know to follow affected males very closely and offer treatments early on.

lved and it can be tested for, they'll know to follow affected males very c

most protein reconfigurations occur in nanoseconds

In research on proteins, it was assumed (given their chemical composition) proteins would uniformly fold as they cool down and unfold as they heat up. (Think of a balloon expanding and shrinking with the temperature of the air inside.) The experiments didn’t bear this out; the rate of folding or unfolding according to temperature change was unequal (asymmetric) and uneven (nonlinear).

In recent biochemistry a great deal of work is done with ‘tagging’ or ‘marking’ molecules with fluorescent and phosphorescent materials. It’s well known that fluorescence and phosphorescence are phenomena closely related to protein folding and they can only be understood in terms of quantum transition between molecules.

With a quantum transition, the protein could change configuration by ‘jumping’ – skipping all the transition steps – to the final configuration. They call this quantum folding and they developed a mathematical model that shows how the folding, which is virtually instantaneous, would react to change in temperature.

Their quantum transition model matched the folding curves for 15 different proteins and also provides an explanation for the different rates of folding and unfolding among these proteins.

Luo and Lu’s paper is short, a mere 16 pdf pages, and the model is unpretentious mathematically. (Luo has several other related papers on arXiv.) It comes from unknown researchers in an unknown corner of the academic world, and it’s published on the open-source arXiv system. The lack of pedigree means that it will take more time than usual for scientists around the world to learn of it, examine it, and possibly test it.

Hoogsteen base pairs were known to exist primarily in RNA and had been observed in DNA only when there was damage to the DNA structure, or something else like a protein or drug was bound to it.

In RNA the Hoogsteen base pairs have been studied fairly extensively. They are considered an “excited state” and are useful to observe unusual protein binding. In DNA the Hoogsteen base pairing, which by the way has two forms, normal and reverse, was considered an anomaly.

It was discovered that normal DNA undergoes these shifts about 1% of the time and they last only milliseconds.

“Together, these data suggest that there are multiple layers of information stored in the genetic code.” Because critical interactions between DNA and proteins are thought to be directed by both the sequence of bases and the flexing of the DNA molecule, these excited states represent a whole new level of information contained in the genetic code.

important for bioremediation efforts and for developing molecular probes to monitor PCB degrading

Some of those genes, surprised geneticists reported Thursday, can rise from the dead like zombies, waking up to cause one of the most common forms of muscular dystrophy.

It is a dominant genetic disease.

people who have the disease cannot smile.

FSHD affects about 1 in 20,000 people

function, if any, is largely unknown.

it was not completely inactive. It is always transcribed

copied by the cell as a first step to making a protein.

But the transcriptions were faulty, disintegrating right away. They were missing a crucial section, called a poly (A) sequence, needed to stabilize them.