Word: molecular
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Committee co-chair and biologist Andrew Murray retorted, “I suspect that in 1956, your counterpart might have said, ‘I expect to see great research going on in biology and physics but not in this new field of molecular biology...
...recent study headed by researchers at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified a complete map of the genetic regions that may influence how estrogen contributes to breast cancer—results that could advance clinical treatment for breast cancer patients. The study identifies the molecular “control panels,” which consists of thousands of on-off switches for genes, that may be part of the mechanism by which estrogen regulates breast cancer. The findings—to be published in Nature Genetics this month—may help individualize treatment for breast cancer...
...State University scientist Morris Goodman showed, for example, that injecting a chicken with a particular blood protein from a human, a gorilla or a chimp provoked a specific immune response, whereas proteins from orangutans and gibbons produced no response at all. And by 1975, the then new science of molecular genetics had led to a landmark paper by two University of California, Berkeley, scientists, Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson, estimating that chimps and humans share between 98% and 99% of their genetic material...
This shockingly small number made it clear to scientists that genes alone don't dictate the differences between species; the changes, they now know, also depend on molecular switches that tell genes when and where to turn on and off. "Take the genes involved in creating the hand, the penis and the vertebrae," says Lovejoy. "These share some of the same structural genes. The pelvis is another example. Humans have a radically different pelvis from that of apes. It's like having the blueprints for two different brick houses. The bricks are the same, but the results are very different...
...Those molecular switches lie in the noncoding regions of the genome--once known dismissively as junk DNA but lately rechristened the dark matter of the genome. Much of the genome's dark matter is, in fact, junk--the residue of evolutionary events long forgotten and no longer relevant. But a subset of the dark matter known as functional noncoding DNA, comprising some 3% to 4% of the genome and mostly embedded within and around the genes, is crucial. "Coding regions are much easier for us to study," says Carroll, whose new book, The Making of the Fittest...