The writers of popular forensics drama franchise CSI would be well advised to read Genome Biology today, as we publish an article that employs a widely used epigenetics assay to show that age can be predicted with reasonable accuracy from pretty much any human DNA sample, so long as it is sourced from healthy tissue…. Read more »
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We are delighted to welcome Prof Lester Drewes (University of Minnesota) and Prof Richard Keep (University of Michigan) to their new positions as co-Editors-in-Chief of Fluids and Barriers of the CNS, working alongside Hazel Jones (King’s College London, UK). Lester Drewes is Professor and Head of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Minnesota… Read more »
Written by Dr Tomislav Horvat, University of Zagreb, Croatia Recently, I was reading about the phenomenon of genetic mosaicism and its implications for the development of human diseases. Generation of genetically distinct cells from a single zygote is caused by de novo mutational events, including large chromosomal alterations (whole-chromosome aneuploidy, segmental aneuploidy). In addition, advances… Read more »
Nobel prizes can sometimes set me a-wondering what the point in journals is. One of the most well-known Nobel-winning papers, that of Watson & Crick, was published in Nature – sixty years ago – without peer review (readers of Science's recent so-called 'sting' on Open Access and peer review might want to take note of… Read more »
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It is estimated that in a single mammalian cell the median copy number of an mRNA is 17 molecules, with the dynamic range spread over four orders of magnitude. At the same time, an average microRNA can recognize as many as 400 target sites, and has to be able to do so equally effectively for… Read more »
1This post was originally featured on BioMed Central’s magazine Biome. Grasses belonging to the genus Sorghum are grown on a large scale in the United States, mainly as animal feed. However, in light of drives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, sorghum has also been grown as a biofuel. Sorghum crops have potential benefits over corn… Read more »
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Written by Professor Monika Puzianowska-Kuznicka, Warsaw University, Poland It is still under debate why we age. The majority of gerontologists think that aging is not genetically programmed, but it results from accumulation of stochastic damage to all types of cellular molecules, and DNA damage seems to be the most important for the aging process. Nevertheless, on… Read more »
Urban birds wake earlier due to the suppression of melatonin production finds new research published in Frontiers in Zoology today. This suggests that birds living in urban environments could become desynchronized with the light-dark cycle which affects daily behaviour as well as annual breeding cycles. It is known that urban birds are affected by artificial… Read more »
With great fanfare comes great cynicism, and so it should: science is built on a tug-of-war between novel claims and kneejerk skeptism, and the probity that follows. When a sound bite leaked out of last year's ENCODE publications, of which Genome Biology was a participatory journal, that '80% of the human genome has a function',… Read more »
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