Meaningless genetic code helped form human hands

Genetic code once written off as meaningless is today show to have played a potential role in the evolution of the human ability to hold tools and walk upright.

The study is the latest in a long line of evidence to show that the genetics textbooks will have to be rewritten.

It underlines how, even though the human genetic code was read letter by letter for the first time in 2000, geneticists are still struggling to figure out what it means almost a decade later.

When scientists refer to genes, they mean stretches of DNA code that contain the instructions to make the proteins that build and operate the body.

When the genome was first unveiled, it was thought all human genes resided in only around 1.5 per cent of the cell's DNA, prompting some scientists so dismiss the other 98.5 per cent as "junk".

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'Designer baby' to be free from breast cancer

I don't know what to think about this...let the hype begin...

A British woman has made history by conceiving the country's first "designer baby" guaranteed to be free from hereditary breast cancer.

Using controversial screening techniques, doctors rejected six embryos which tested positive for the cancer gene in favour of "healthy" ones to ensure the child would not contract the disease.

The 27-year-old, who wishes to remain anonymous, is now 14 weeks pregnant with her first child after she was implanted with two of the cleared embryos.

She chose to go through the procedure because her husband had tested positive for the gene and his grandmother, mother, sister and cousin had all battled breast cancer.

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5 Cool Things You Can Do With Your DNA

5 Cool Things You Can Do With Your DNA

Controversial DNA scientist retires

It's a shame that this will be how this person will be remembered...

in the meantime...don't let the door hit you on your way out...

NEW YORK - James Watson, famous for DNA research but widely condemned for recent comments about intelligence levels among blacks, retired Thursday from his post at a prestigious research institution.

Watson, 79, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York announced his departure a week after the lab suspended him. He was chancellor of the institution, and his retirement took effect immediately.

Watson shared a Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 for co-discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. He is one of America's most prominent scientists.

In his statement Thursday, Watson said that because of his age, his retirement was "more than overdue. The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired."

Watson, who has a long history of making provocative statements, ran into trouble last week for remarks he made in the Sunday Times Magazine of London. A profile quoted him as saying that he's "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really."

He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true." He also said people should not be discriminated against because of their color, adding that "there are many people of color who are very talented."

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Scientists Find Clues to Crack Brain's "Neural Code"

New Study in Nature Suggests Timing of Electrical Pulses Is Key to Understanding How Brain Cells Communicate

NEW YORK (Sept. 11, 2007) — Decoding the complex electrical signals that brain cells use to "talk" to each other is a new and important frontier in neuroscience, one that could revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disease.

Now, a multicenter team, led by a researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, says they have uncovered a vital clue to help decode that neural language.

The groundbreaking work is published in Nature.

"We discovered that the specific timing of these electrical pulses is crucial to interpreting how the neural code works as the brain represents what it sees in the natural environment. Understanding the 'time scales' that matter to the brain gives us insight into which units of the neural code we need to focus on if we ever hope to decode it," explains lead author Dr. Daniel A. Butts, who is an Institute Fellow and instructor of computational neuroscience at the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell.

The term "neural code" may be unfamiliar to most people, but it underlies nearly everything the brain's trillions of cells do each millisecond.

"The neural code is the key to understanding the patterns of electrical impulses that neurons use to communicate. These electrical patterns allow the brain to make sense of incoming stimuli, make decisions based on that information, and coordinate its activities to carry out tasks," Dr. Butts explains.

Trouble is, right now scientists have no way of interpreting this neural language.

"It's like we're hearing Morse code, but have no training in understanding what the separate beeps and dashes mean," Dr. Butts says. "And the brain's neural code is infinitely more complex than Morse code."

Unraveling the neural code would undoubtedly be a major milestone for science.

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Scientists reveal DNA-enzyme interaction with first ever real time footage

Why isn't this on Youtube?...

For the first time scientists have been able to film, in real-time, the nanoscale interaction of an enzyme and a DNA strand from an attacking virus. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have used a revolutionary Scanning Atomic Force Microscope in Japan to produce amazing footage of a protective enzyme unravelling the DNA of a virus trying to infect a bacterial host.

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A new wrinkle in evolution -- Man-made proteins

what will people think!!!

Nature, through the trial and error of evolution, has discovered a vast diversity of life from what can only presumed to have been a primordial pool of building blocks. Inspired by this success, a new Biodesign Institute research team, led by John Chaput, is now trying to mimic the process of Darwinian evolution in the laboratory by evolving new proteins from scratch. Using new tricks of molecular biology, Chaput and co-workers have evolved several new proteins in a fraction of the 3 billion years it took nature.

Their most recent results, published in the May 23rd edition of the journal PLoS ONE, have led to some surprisingly new lessons on how to optimize proteins which have never existed in nature before, in a process they call ‘synthetic evolution.’

"The goal of our research is to understand certain fundamental questions regarding the origin and evolution of proteins," said Chaput, a researcher in the institute’s Center for BioOptical Nanotechnology and assistant professor in Arizona State University’s department of chemistry and biochemistry. "Would proteins that we evolve in the lab look like proteins we see today in nature or do they look totally different from the set of proteins nature ultimately chose" By gaining a better understanding of these questions, we hope to one day create new tailor-made catalysts that can be used as therapeutics in molecular medicine or biocatalysts in biotechnology."

The building blocks of proteins are 20 different amino acids that are strung together and folded to make the unique globular shape, stability and function of every protein. The mixing and matching of the amino acid chain like numbers in the lottery are what favor the odds in nature of finding just the right combinations to help generate biological diversity. Yet no one can predict how the string of amino acids sequence folds to make the 3-D functional structure of a protein.

To select the raw ingredients to create the proteins, Chaput’s group (which includes Harvard collaborator Jack Szostak, and ASU colleagues Jim Allen, Meitian Wang, Matthew Rosenow and Matthew Smith) began their quest by further evolving a protein that had been previously selected from a pool of random sequences.

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