Worried your man is cheating? Don’t rely on hunches, send his undies to the lab. Some suspicious people are paying upwards of $500 to air their dirty laundry, and a DNA-testing company is happily testing suspected spouses’ condoms, sheets, and tighty whities for genetic signs of infidelity.
Chromosomal Laboratories Inc., the same company that has offered paternal-testing giveaways on Father’s Day, is now in the unmentionables business. The company offers a smorgasbord of tests starting with a UV-light sweep and going as far as a microscopic search for sperm heads.
On the version of the company’s website designed for suspicious men, the biological sleuths describe a test for Prostate Specific Antigen and boast: “The technique is extremely powerful because it can confirm the presence of semen even in samples from sterile or vasectomized men.”
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Do I smell a banana? Nope. It’s a blue light I’m smelling.
Fruit fly larvae made this mistake while participating in a study recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior. By adding a light-sensitive protein to certain smell receptors in the larvae, German scientists allowed the genetically engineered bugs to essentially smell light.
The team, under the guidance of Klemens Störtkuhl at Ruhr University Bochum, is attempting to understand “olfactory coding”–how the brain transforms chemical signals into perceptible smells. Normally, a fly’s olfactory receptor neurons only send an electrical signal to its brain when the fly smells something, but by adding a protein the researchers caused a neuron to fire when the one-millimeter bug was basking in blue light.
The fly brain uses some of its 28 olfactory neurons to detect bad smells, and others for good ones. Protein puppeteers, the researchers could pick which neuron to add the light-sensing protein to. The good-smelling neurons respond to a smorgasbord of fly-friendly scents: like banana, marzipan, and glue (apparently rotting fruit gives off these scents). By attaching the light-sensitive protein to one of these neurons, researchers caused the typically light-fearing insects to crawl straight towards the blue glow.
According to a ScienceDaily article, given their successful mapping of these larvae olfactory neurons, the researchers next hope to make adult fruit flies go bananas.
Related content:
Discoblog: Neuroscientist Says We Perceive “Smounds”—Half Sound, Half Smell
80beats: A Life-Extending Coup: Flies That Can’t Smell Food Live 30 Percent Longer
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Smell a lady, shrug off flu – how female odours give male mice an immune boost
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Elephants smell the difference between human ethnic groups
DISCOVER: The Brain: The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells
Image: flickr / Jason Gulledge
This fall, incoming students at UC Berkeley will find a little something extra in their welcome packages: cotton swabs. The university is hoping that students will swab a few cells from the insides of their cheeks and pass them over to the university for DNA testing.
The university says this exercise will get students excited about the prospects of personalized medicine, in which genetic testing could allow doctors to tailor their treatments to individual patients. The administration stresses that students won’t be tested for their risks of serious diseases, but instead for three fairly mundane genes.
USA Today reports:
Geneticists will analyze each sample for three genes: metabolism of folate, tolerance of lactose and metabolism of alcohol, all relatively innocuous and perhaps useful in students’ daily lives. Students will be able to use that information to learn if they should eat more leafy green vegetables, steer clear of milk products or limit alcohol intake.
Jasper Rine, the professor of Genetics and Development Biology who’s overseeing the project, swears he’s not trying to create a genetic database of thousands of undergraduates for any nefarious purpose. Really, what nefarious purpose could there possibly be?
Anyway, the school can’t make lists of students who might be suitable for slave camp organ farms, because the data will all be anonymous. Each student’s genetics kit will come with two bar codes, one to be stuck on the sample and the other for the student to keep. The student can then retrieve his or her test results from a secure online database using the bar code. So there you go.
Related Content:
80beats: Now For Sale at Fire Sale Prices: Thousands of People’s Genomes
80beats: No Gattaca Here: Genetic Anti-Discrimination Law Goes Into Effect
80beats: Big League Baseball Prospects Face Another Hurdle: the DNA Test
80beats: DNA Sampling of Innocent-Until-Proven-Guilty People Is on the Rise
Image: flickr / Bernt Rostad
To answer that question, don’t go comparing their personality traits (the Newfie: famously loyal and sweet, Tiger Woods: um, no comment). Instead, look to the knees.
Newfoundland dogs are prone to cruciate ligament disease, the same knee disorder that has troubled Woods and many other professional athletes–the disease makes dogs and humans more prone to ligament ruptures. Now, researchers at Liverpool University are asking Newfie owners to send in DNA samples from their pets so they can search for genetic factors that predispose dogs to the condition.
According to lead researcher Arabella Baird, the study could have two benefits. If researchers determine which genes put dogs at risk of the condition, they can help breeders create healthier lines of dogs by preventing matings between dogs with the key genes. But the study may also help medical researchers find the comparable genes in humans, The Guardian reports:
Baird added: “The disease in humans tends to occur when stress is put on the ligament, but there have been some preliminary findings that suggest there is a genetic component that could predispose humans to the condition…. Our project will be looking at many genes and the results of our study in dogs will be comparative to the human medical field.”
Related Content:
Discoblog: Have a Martini, Save Your Knees?
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Discoblog: New Device Aims to Read Your Dog’s Mind—and Broadcast It on Twitter
80beats: Revealed: The Genetic Secret of the Dachshund’s Stubby Legs
80beats: Hairless Dogs Give up the Genetic Secret of Their Bald Glory
Image: Wikipedia
For the tiny flatworm, regeneration of missing body parts is a piece of cake. Someone chopped its head off? No problem! It grows a brand new one in about seven days, complete with a spanking new brain with all the right circuits and connections. (As for the chopped-off head, it just grows a new body.)
This amazing ability of the flatworm to regrow a missing head and to produce a brain on demand has now been traced back to a key gene, researchers report in a PloS Genetics study. The identification of the gene is exciting news for scientists who wonder if humans, too, can one day learn to regenerate missing body parts.
The Register reports that the discovery of the “smed-prep” gene unlocks the mechanisms by which the hard-to-kill Planarian flatworms grow new muscle, gut, and brain cells:
Even more importantly, it seems that the information contained in smed-prep also makes the new cells appear in the right place and organize themselves into working structures – as opposed to nonfunctional blobs of protoplasm.
Lead researcher Aziz Aboobaker describes the worm’s regenerative superpowers to the BBC:
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Shaggy dogs do it, snakes do it, and now a new breed of sheep will do it–molt, that is. A British breeder has created the country’s first self-shearing sheep, which will shed its wool once the weather gets warmer, thus saving farmers the time and bother of shearing.
The new sheep is called “Exlana,” which is Latin for “used to have wool.” It was created by crossing exotic breeds like the Barbados Blackbelly and the St. Croix.
The result was a sheep with a thin wool coat that it sheds in the spring. Breeders say it produces substantially less wool than the typical British sheep, making the process quicker: While a normal sheep produces almost 20 pounds of wool, the Exlana yields just one pound.
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You may think of your furry feline friend simply as a companion, but look closely and you will find that your whiskered pal also the ability to be a crime-fighting supercat.
An team of scientists has found that fur shed by cats can serve as forensic evidence, thanks to the DNA it contains. In fact, a man was recently convicted of second-degree murder in Canada after fur found on his discarded jacket matched that of Snowball–the victim’s cat. The telltale fur led to a 15-year prison sentence. Scientists say that it may soon become commonplace to use the genetic material in fur shed by cats to link perpetrators, accomplices, witnesses, and victims.
As the researchers wrote in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics:
“Cats are fastidious groomers, and shed fur can have sufficient genetic material for trace forensic studies, allowing potential analysis of both standard short tandem repeat (STR) and mitochondrial DNA regions.”
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The next time, you’re taking shots straight out of a bottle of mezcal, the potent Mexican alcohol made from the agave or a maguey plant, remember what you’re drinking. Swirling in your mouth is not just the strong smoky alcohol guaranteed to knock you out, but also caterpillar DNA from the “worm” that is often found at the bottom of the bottle.
The worm is actually the larval form of the moth Hypopta agavis that lives on the agave plant and really has no business being in the bottle except to serve as a marketing gimmick. Still, many a drinker has set out to prove his iron will and iron stomach by swallowing the booze-soaked insect at the bottom. Turns out there’s no need for such dramatic gestures. Researchers have found that DNA from the caterpillar can be extracted from the alcohol it’s preserved in.
Ars technica reports on the scientists findings:
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Dear reader: You’re a mutant. But take comfort—it’s not just you. According to recent research, every person on Earth introduces between 100 and 200 new genetic mutations into the human genome.
BBC News reports:
[Researchers] looked at thousands of genes in the Y chromosomes of two Chinese men. They knew the men were distantly related, having shared a common ancestor who was born in 1805.
By looking at the number of differences between the two men, and the size of the human genome, they were able to come up with an estimate of between 100 and 200 new mutations per person.
This number of mutations is small compared to the size of the full human genome, so finding them was apparently quite a feat. Such a feat, in fact, that one of the scientists reportedly said that “finding this tiny number of mutations was more difficult than finding an ant’s egg in an emperor’s rice store.”
Some mutations can give rise to health conditions like cancer, so being able to identify new genetic variations not only could teach us about our own evolution, but could even help prevent disease-causing alterations in our DNA.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Can DNA Testing Reveal China’s Future Stars?
Discoblog: Looking to Immortalize Your Pet? Now You Can Turn Muffy’s DNA Into a Diamond
Discoblog: Two Twins, Two Dads: DNA Test Proves “Twins” Born to Different Fathers
Image: flickr / ghutchis
Could milk from mice be the next key ingredient in infant formula? Perhaps…if researchers can find an efficient way to milk them, that is.
Apparently, getting the tiny rodents to produce lactoferrin, a protein found in human breast milk, wasn’t a problem, once the Russian scientists added a few human genes to the mice’s genome.
Mouse milk naturally has a higher concentration of proteins than the human stuff, so when the mice began producing human milk protein, they made a lot of it. In fact, the fuzzy creatures produced up to six ounces of lactoferrin per quart of milk, as opposed to the measly four to five grams per quart pumped out by humans. The lactoferrin in breast milk is important because it shields babies from infection as their immune systems form.
Mass production of human milk protein could allow the substance to be used in synthetic infant formula. Today, formula is largely made up of protein from soybeans or cow’s milk, and although the subject remains controversial, some experts say it does not provide babies with the same health benefits of human milk.
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