Word: dna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Basic Research from the American Association for Cancer Research and the Brinker Award from the Komen Foundation, King has served on such committees as the National Commission on Breast Cancer of the President’s Cancer Panel and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Use of DNA in Forensics. She has worked as a consultant to the Commission on Disappearance of Persons of the Republic of Argentina...
...genes, like all genes, are switched on and off in different parts of the body at different times. In this way, genes can have subtly different effects, depending on where, when and how they are switched on. The switches that control this process--stretches of DNA upstream of genes--are known as promoters...
...will find that a mouse has seven neck and 13 thoracic vertebrae, a chicken 14 and seven, respectively. The source of this difference lies in the promoter attached to HoxC8, a hox gene that helps shape the thorax of the body. The promoter is a 200-letter paragraph of DNA, and in the two species it differs by just a handful of letters. The effect is to alter the expression of the HoxC8 gene in the development of the chicken embryo. This means the chicken makes thoracic vertebrae in a different part of the body than the mouse...
...human beings do. Others, such as the montane vole, have only transitory liaisons, as do chimpanzees. The difference, according to Tom Insel and Larry Young at Emory University in Atlanta, lies in the promoter upstream of the oxytocin-and vasopressin-receptor genes. The insertion of an extra chunk of DNA text, usually about 460 letters long, into the promoter makes the animal more likely to bond with its mate. The extra text does not create love, but perhaps it creates the possibility of falling in love after the right experience...
FARMACEUTICALS: Corn with human DNA? Genetically altered crops could yield powerful new drugs, but critics fear the cure might be worse than the disease...