Word: dna
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...understand why, you need to know about a curious feature of some genes. Except for the genes that occur on the sex-determining X and Y chromosomes, it generally doesn't matter whether you inherit a particular stretch of DNA from your mother or your father. In the past 15 years, though, researchers have learned that at least 50 pairs of these so-called autosomal genes act a little differently. In a process called imprinting, one of each pair is permanently turned on or off, depending on whether it derives from the sperm...
...talk about cloning has not escaped the notice of opportunistic entrepreneurs. One company is offering celebrities a chance to copyright their genes, so no one will be able to clone them while they're not looking. "Michael Jordan's sweaty towel and Madonna's sunglasses contain traces of their DNA," says Andre Crump of the DNA Copyright Institute, based in San Francisco. "It could be used to create an unauthorized clone." For $1,500, Crump will provide celebs with a (c) on their genes. Of course, a symbol isn't necessary to prove that anyone's DNA is unique. Maybe...
...Bustamante's specialty. Bustamante, 50, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, came to the U.S. from Peru 26 years ago as a Fulbright scholar. In the early 1990s, while at the University of Oregon, he and his colleagues tacked one end of a DNA molecule to a magnetic bead and measured its elasticity by tugging at the bead with magnets. A stroke of genius, no doubt, but to what end? "We didn't quite know how to answer that question at the time," admits Bustamante. "We did it because nobody had done it before...
...Bustamante isn't just interested in tearing molecules apart. Last year he applied the lessons he learned in the early 1990s to describe, step by step, how a lone enzyme copies a DNA sequence into RNA. Even identical enzymes, he found, often work differently--some dawdle and abandon their duties, while others go about their business with a bluster. Routine biochemistry would have glossed over such details. "Carlos," says Tjian, "has taken us to the next level...
...narrower than those that were being asked 100 years ago. As John Horgan pointed out in his controversial 1997 best seller The End of Science, we've already made most of the fundamental discoveries--that the blueprint for most living things is carried in a molecule called DNA; that the universe began with a Big Bang; that atoms are made of protons, electrons and neutrons; that evolution proceeds by natural selection. Though today's problems are less sweeping, they are no less important. The diseases scientists are trying to cure still cause human misery and death; the answers they...