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The effort is part of a $45 million program across all the branches of the armed forces to figure out military applications for genetic engineering.

Society and the government aren’t sure what to make of new techniques for animal breeding.

https://www.bustle.com/p/7-creepy-things-a-dead-body-can-do-…e-13550864

There’s a positive correlation of assisted reproductive technologies with arterial hypertension. Epigenetics and hormone treatments with IVF are probable causes.

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been shown to induce premature vascular aging in apparently healthy children. In mice, ART-induced premature vascular aging evolves into arterial hypertension. Given the young age of the human ART group, long-term sequelae of ART-induced alterations of the cardiovascular phenotype are unknown.

This study hypothesized that vascular alterations persist in adolescents and young adults conceived by ART and that arterial hypertension possibly represents the first detectable clinically relevant endpoint in this group.

Continue reading “Association of Assisted Reproductive Technologies With Arterial Hypertension During Adolescence” »

For decades after the discovery of DNA, researchers mostly thought of genetics in terms of genes, the pieces or sequences of DNA that encode instructions for building proteins in cells. Then scientists discovered that genes make up just 2 percent of our DNA and that most genetic complexity stems from the vast non-gene code, which influences when genes are turned on or off. Further, half of that non-gene code was found to come from insertions of viral DNA. Consequently, say the authors, genetic variation, and the potential for disease-causing mistakes, occurs in transposons as well as in genes.

New laboratory techniques can identify which of our genes are influenced by DNA snippets that are left behind in our genetic code by viruses, a new study finds.

Evolutionary genetic theory shows that genetic variation can be maintained when selection favors different versions of the same genes in males and females—an inevitable outcome of having separate sexes. That is, for many genes, there may not be a universally ‘best’ version, but rather one is best for males and one is best for females. This is known as sexually antagonistic genetic variation, but it might only be maintained under a narrow set of conditions, limiting its prevalence in nature. However, a new study by Dr. Karl Grieshop and Professor Göran Arnqvist, published in PLoS Biology, may change this view.

“One of the simplest ways for sexually antagonistic selection to maintain genetic variation in fitness is via sex-specific dominance reversal, where neither version of a gene is always dominant or recessive, but rather the version that benefits a given sex is also dominant in that sex. So whether a given version of a gene is dominant or recessive to the other will depend upon which sex it is in,” says Dr. Karl Grieshop.

Eight genes linked to red hair have been discovered by scientists, helping to shed light on how redheads inherit their distinctive locks.

The Edinburgh University-led research has been described as the largest genetic study of hair colour to date.

It had been thought red hair was controlled by a single gene, MC1R, with versions passed on from both parents.

Populations of indigenous people in southern Africa carry a gene that causes lighter skin, and scientists have now identified the rapid evolution of this gene in recent human history.

The gene that causes lighter skin pigmentation, SLC24A5, was introduced from eastern African to southern African populations just 2,000 years ago. Strong positive selection caused this gene to rise in frequency among some KhoeSan populations.

UC Davis anthropologist Brenna Henn and colleagues have shown that a gene for lighter skin spread rapidly among people in southern Africa in the last 2,000 years.

Continue reading “Rapid genetic evolution linked to lighter skin pigmentation in a southern African population” »