Stories tagged DNA
Can you spot the nightmare?: There he is!
Courtesy FasterDixOkay. Now I know what you’re thinking: “Every scene in Willow is frightening. Each scene is, in fact, somehow the most frightening scene. Will all of that become real too?”
Don’t worry, my doves, don’t worry.
You won’t be pursued through the forest by horrible pig dogs.
You won’t be puked on by a magic baby.
Your ethnicity won’t be slandered by drunks and soldiers.
You will not be captured and molested by hideous little rat men.
Monkeylike trolls will not chase you through derelict castles.
You won’t have to watch one of those awful trolls turn inside out and morph into a dragon. And you will not have to fight that dragon.
A shirtless Val Kilmer will not threaten you.
There will not be epic battles, nor attempted baby sacrifices.
You will not be stabbed by a man with a skull mask and an unspeakable caveman face.
A metal brazier will not chase you around a lightning-lit tower.
No wands will be brandished at you.
The town loudmouth will not belittle you in front of your family.
So, all in all, there’s relatively little to be concerned about. That said, there is one more most frightening scene to consider.
Do you remember when the army of Madmartigan and Airk Thaughbaer first laid siege to the fortress of Nockmark? Before Willow was able to fully control the powers of Cherlindrea’s wand and return Fin Raziel to her human, albeit greatly aged, form? You’ll recall that as soon as Airk, Madmartigan and Sorsha confront Bavmorda at the gates of Nockmark, the evil enchantress turns the whole of the attacking army into pigs. Once they were pigs things don’t seem so bad, but the process of turning into pigs was horrible to watch. There were hoof-hands everywhere, and emerging piggy snouts, and tusks, and oinking, and everybody looked really sweaty. It was very frightening to see, and it’s happening in our own plane of existence: human-pig hybrids have been given the go-ahead in England.
Careful examination of the story clearly indicates that half human, half pig creatures like those in Willow are neither the intent here, nor are they actually possible from these experiments. But I tend to believe what I imagine is the case more than what I’m old is the case.
If you do want to waste your time with what you’re told, however, listen up:
The aim of this research is in no way to create a weird pig man. Or a weird man pig. The goal is actually to put human DNA from skin cells into a pig egg that has had its chromosomes removed, and then let it develop into an embryo. In fact, the scientists involved are attempting to create an embryo with no animal DNA left in it at all (kind of ironic, I suppose).
There’s more to it, of course, but the idea is this: the human DNA put into the eggs will be DNA taken from people with a genetic heart disease. As the scientists observe the transformation from egg to embryo, they hope to better understand the molecular mechanics of the disease. That information could then be used to create better treatments for people living with related heart conditions. None of the “hybrids” will develop past the very first stages of being an embryo (basically a featureless sphere of cells).
Or, if you’re into letting your gut and imagination do your critical thinking for you…prepare yourself for Island of Doctor Moreau Earth.
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Where are you going?: I'm going home.
Courtesy MilaNew tests performed on a meteorite found in Australia suggest that life on earth could have had its start in space; it’s possible that the first components of self-replicating genetic material came from outer space.
This particular meteorite only struck Earth about 40 years ago, but new studies confirm that the molecules uracil and xanthine (which are found in our RNA) were present in the meteoritic fragments before human contamination.
Uracil and xanthine are “nucleobases,” and play an important role in the replication of DNA. Some have argued that these molecules could have originally formed on Earth, but these researchers claim that the atmospheric conditions on the planet at the time the first organic molecules are thought to have appeared would have prohibited a terrestrial origin. Going even further, they state that it’s possible—assuming that there are all these vital molecules floating out there on meteors—that life, or at least the key components for life (a big difference I suppose), could be widespread in the universe.
I prefer extraterrestrial life delivery by spaceship, but I guess I’ll take what I can get. Wild.
Cloneable Vikings nearly within reach
When your old Viking wears out: Just toss him out and buy a fresh one.
Courtesy Extra MediumWe live in exciting times. If I knew how to spell “exciting” I would write it out, letter by letter, just to emphasize how exciting these times are. E X I T I N G.
F A Y L Y U R.
Who among us hasn’t sat at home as a child, listening to Wagner, wishing that Vikings still existed, or even, perhaps, that we might have our own little Viking…
But farewell my little Viking—thems is dreams, just dreams.
Or are thems? Is thems?
The Danes, you see, have had their scientists hard at work, scouring the earth for viable Viking DNA. Their first thought was to mine archaeological sites for petrified Viking beard dreadlocks, with the hope that somewhere inside might be preserved ticks, full of rich Viking blood. This idea was quickly abandoned, however, on account of its being “indskrænket.”
The geneticists then considered a much simpler solution: getting dirty in a Viking grave. Using teeth from a thousand year old Viking burial on the Danish Island of Funen, the scientists were able to obtain “authentic Viking DNA!”
The world is changing! Can you feel it? It’s like sitting in a warming hot tub!
Soon we will be able to observe real cloned Vikings! Just think…we’ll finally know if their helmets really were horny…we could even have a Viking theme park on an island (I’m thinking Funen). I think it could work!
Real Vikings…
Some might argue that the point of this research had nothing at all to do with cloning Vikings, or cloning at all. They would probably point out that retrieving ancient human DNA is notoriously fraught with complications involving modern genetic contamination, as well as simply finding fully intact DNA molecules (fill the gaps in the Viking DNA with frog genes. Duh). They might also say that analyzing ancient DNA can tell us about the origins of diseases, human migration patterns, and tribal and family organizations not recorded by history.
Yawn. Wake me up when they mention “pet Viking.”
The Danish researchers collected and analyzed the DNA in meticulously controlled situations, wearing full body suits and facemasks during collection and using sterilized tubes for transport of the specimens back to the lab. A wise move, I think—if the samples were contaminated, just think about the monstrosity that could emerge from the cloning procedure that is sure to come: a Viking/Danish hybrid. It would be like The Fly, I bet.
Sorry, Boss: I count five fingers, and zero teeth. You're out.
Courtesy ConstantNowWhere have I been for the past few months? Seriously, where? Have I not been sitting in a cube, mainlining the hot, sticky, electrical ecstasy that is the Internet? I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ve been—I’ve got the track marks to prove it. But then how the hell did I miss this?
Um, I don’t know who got this Internet, or from where, but let me say this: it’s weak. Someone must be cutting my Internet with television or, god forbid, radio. All this time I think I’m on the vibrating edge of the hottest new pseudo-science, when I’m actually—metaphorically—stuck in a damn cave, banging out Morse code on my own head with a rock. Ugh, I feel dirty.
Anyway, if I hadn’t spent so much time thinking that lolcats were so remarkable, I might have noticed a certain awesome story back in February. It seems that a few months ago a family minivan was attacked in the night. Not just attacked—I can, and have, attacked many minivans, and I don’t try to get on the news for it—but chewed up; “The whole front half of our van is chewed up. There are bite marks right through the front grill. Both sides of the van above the wheel wells were bitten and the metal is bent like a piece of paper,” said the vehicle’s upset owner.
And who, or what, committed this heinous act of, um, vandalism? Do I even need to ask? No—we’ll say the question was rhetorical, because it was obviously the Lizard Man of Lee frickn’ County who done it.
Y’all know about the Lizard Man? You don’t, but you should, so sit right down on the cryptocouch and buckle up. That’s right—the cryptocouch has seatbelts now. Why? For safety. You’ll need them.
The Lizard Man is a relatively new cryptid, first showing his scaly face in the summer of 1988 in swampy Lee County, South Carolina. Local 17-year-old, Christopher Davis, claims to have encountered the creature driving home from work at about 2 AM. Young Davis, said to be as honest as the day is long, had stopped beside the road to change a blown out tire. Just as he was finishing up, he heard a thumping sound approaching from behind. He turned around to see a bizarre creature running towards him. Christopher, sensibly, attempted to escape in the car, but the creature leapt on to the roof and latched on. Christopher was only eventually able to lose the beast by accelerating and swerving to shake it from the car. Yowza.
Described as bipedal, approximately seven feet tall, and well-built (okaay), with scaly green skin, glowing eyes, and clawed, three-fingered hands, the creature severely damaged Davis’s side rear-view mirror, and left scratches in the roof of his car.
In the month that followed, there were a few reports of lizard creature sightings, and several cars parked near the swamps were found to have unusual scratches and bite marks. By the end of the summer, however, Lizard Man mania had largely died down, the creature apparently having returned to its swampy home…
Until February, 2008! The Lizard Man was up to his old tricks again (biting cars), but this time he left some blood on the scene. Should have known better, L-Ma—science loves blood. Well, the cleverboots of Lee County thought to have that blood DNA tested, and the results are in: the Lizard Man is… a dog.
Yeah, just like our latest chupacabra, this particular incident can be chalked up to man’s best friend. Why our best friend was chewing on a minivan has yet to be explained. Must have been a pretty bitey pooch, though—check out the video. You might also notice some leading evidence from the footage that the original story failed to mention: along with the attack on the minivan, the family’s morning paper had been shredded, and the box that the cat slept in was all torn up. Well… lizards do hate the news, and men simply cannot abide a comfortable cat. It all adds up to one thing: Lizard Man. As far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out on this one. What if the lizard man had just eaten a dog before he molested the van? Or perhaps he coerced a dog into it.
All right, you can unbuckle now.
Join the fight!: Grimace is doing his part.
Courtesy GiantGinkoOkay…I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think it’s important that you’re all made aware of this threat before it’s too late. I mean, like, we didn’t used to be afraid of that little ball of goo until it became the blob, and now we’re in deep, deep fudge. That kind of thing.
Okay, so…ugh, why do I have to do this? Just prepare yourself, get a fresh pair of pants ready, and please, please don’t panic. Not yet. That could be dangerous.
There is…somewhere, like, out there…a bacteria that is literally a million times bigger than other bacteria. Do you understand what this means? Do you understand what “literally” means? It doesn’t mean, “I’m literally going to starve to death if I don’t get that pizza!” It means for real. For really real. And do you know what “a million” means? Of course you do. It’s like, if you had to fight another guy and his ninety nine friends, and then had to fight nine hundred and ninety nine more groups just like his, and then fight just as many people nine more times—you’d be fighting a million guys. Could you win a fight like that? No, try again, you couldn’t. So what chance do we stand against this gargantuan bacteria? You know that bacteria have no emotions, right? They’ll eat you and your new puppy, and then eat, like, a pumpkin, and they wouldn’t feel any worse about you and your lousy puppy than they would about the dumb pumpkin.
Oh, this is the worst.
Okay, okay, I was the one who said we shouldn’t panic. So let’s look at this beast rationally—maybe we can find a weakness.
What do we know? Well, the monstrosity in question, of the epulopiscium genus, is a million times the size of an E. coli bacterium. A million times bigger. That means that epulopiscium is, let’s see…about the size of a grain of salt. If you, for instance, were for some reason one-hundredth the size of a grain of salt, epulopiscium would be a hundred times bigger than you. A hundred times bigger than you! What else? Well, it seems that the bacteria only live in the stomachs of surgeonfish, in the area of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. That’s where they live for now—the surgeonfish lives in a symbiotic relationship with epulopiscium, so there’s no reason to assume that it will keep its horrible buddy under wraps.
How can we fight this thing? Guns? What good would bullets do against something like this? Nuclear weapons? Only as a last resort. But what if… What if we could turn epulopiscium’s own size against it, like we did with King Kong when we shot him off that building?
Let’s see…Normally bacteria have to be itty-bitty because they haven’t got the specialized organelles to move nutrients around, and their DNA—of which there are only a hundred or so copies—isn’t bound in nuclei; basically their Schmidt is all over the place, so they have to be tiny to keep things working. It seems, however, that the epulopiscium is unique in that it has thousands of copies of its genome incorporated into its cell membrane. That way, if anything remarkable happens in the cell, DNA will be right there to react quickly, locally producing RNA or whatever proteins are necessary for the situation.
So that means we need to destroy its fancy DNA, and then its own bulk will bring the epulopiscium down! And what can damage DNA? Electromagnetic radiation! We need to start dumping radioactive waste into the waters of the Great Barrier Reef immediately! Stat! Ionize their fancy little DNA!
Get to it, Buzzketeers. This will be a modern-day David and Goliath story.
3D nanoassembly using DNA
in Structure of Matter, Chemical Reactions, and Scientific Enterprise
Nano (not!): Built for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, this model of a body-centred cubic crystal is similar to the nano crystal created with DNA except it is magnified 165 billion times.
Courtesy John Kerno
First step toward three-dimensional catalytic, magnetic, and/or optical nanomaterials
Assembling structures that are 1000 times smaller than a human hair is difficult. One technique that works is known as "self assembly". A random mixture of microscopic parts can be coaxed into assembling spontaneously into a desired structure by attaching appropriate segments of DNA to various parts. Complementary DNA strands want to "pair up". This is how nano structures are assembled in living organisms.
"researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have for the first time used DNA to guide the creation of three-dimensional, ordered, crystalline structures of nanoparticles.
Nanomaterials: Golden handshake
The team from Brookhaven and another group from Northwestern University in Evanston, US, both started with tiny spheres of gold around 10 nanometres across, and attached short strands of DNA. By varying the length of the DNA strands, their flexibility,and the types of sticky ends, they are working toward reliably binding them together in particular ways. This is the first step toward building three-dimensional catalytic, magnetic, and/or optical nanomaterials.
Sources:
- "DNA-programmable nanoparticle crystallization" Nature; abstract (Jan 31, 2008)
- New Scientist Tech: source article
- Brookhaven National Laboratory News release from
Sandy Cohen attends a lecture on O.C. Theory genetics: He gets it.
Courtesy lawgeekEverytime I think I’ve got something figured out, science ups and throws something crazy my way. And when I say “crazy” I mean something I would prefer to explain as “magical.”
So, here’s what I understood so far:
Ryan is a smart but troubled kid from Chino (Where’s Chino? I don’t know either. The wrong side of the tracks, we’ll say.). After an incident with a stolen car, Ryan’s public defender, Sandy Cohen, takes pity on the kid (whose mother has recently abandoned him), and brings him back to his family’s extravagant Orange County home. Ryan quickly befriends Sandy’s quirky son, Seth, and – just as quickly – gets himself on the bad side of some of the children of Orange County’s elite, including water polo-playing Luke, who just happens to be the less than entirely faithful boyfriend of Marissa, who is the best friend of Summer (Seth’s lifelong and unattainable crush), and the Cohen’s neighbor (she’s a beautiful and conflicted classic girl-next-door). The chemistry between Ryan and Marissa is obvious from the start, adding confusion to her already difficult life (Marissa’s mother, Julie, is a narcissistic gold-digger, and her father is struggling with rising debts and his feelings for his high school flame Kirsten… Cohen), all of which is contributing to her developing alcohol problem. Meanwhile, as Seth continues to pine over Summer, cool and funky Anna steps into the picture. Anna appreciates the things Seth likes, and, more importantly, appreciates Seth. This would be great, if it weren’t for the fact that Summer starts notice to Seth at just about the same time! Oh boy! As if this all weren’t enough, over the course of the next few episodes Luke sleeps with Julie, who has her eyes on Caleb (Kirsten’s father, and the de facto duke of the O.C.), or at least on his pocketbook. And, just as Ryan is settling down at the Cohen’s, the household is tossed up as Sandy finds out about Kirsten’s substantial loan to Marissa’s father, which wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t also found out about the spur of the moment kiss the two of them shared while painting a model home. Also, Ryan is soon to find out that his ties with Chino aren’t so easily severed, as his ne’er do well brother sets foot in the O.C., and a former romance with a secret finds her way to the Cohen’s pool house…
See? It’s a lot to keep track of, but I was doing ok. Just today, however, I read an article in ScienceDaily and something entirely new and strange was thrown into this slurry we call life: genes are able to recognize similar genes from a distance, without the aid of proteins or “any other biological molecules.” Like, genes find each other by… by… magic! Do you fully understand the implications of these findings? Me neither, only that it means that genes are ever stranger and more confusing than I had previously thought!
“Homologous recombination” occurs when two sets of DNA come together, split their double helixes, and swap sections of genetic information. Recombination is vital for DNA repair, and also for evolution and natural selection. Recombination occurs, for instance, when your parents’ genes come together to make your genes, or when Ryan and Theresa come together to make the cliffhanger for season two. It’s important that genes match up with similar sets of other genes, because faulty combinations are believed to cause some genetically determined diseases like Alzheimer’s and some cancers.
While the first set of interactions and combinations I described can easily be tracked through DVD observation, scientists were forced to fluorescently tag DNA molecules and watch their behavior under a microscope to understand the mysteries of gene recombination. It turns out that the longer a strand of DNA is, the more powerful the mechanism for recognizing a similar strand is.
The two described scenarios, however, may be similar in one sense: the forces of attraction involved between the elements at play. In the case of the denizens of Orange County, I would certainly describe the attractions as “electrical” – sparks fly, and the pull between characters is magnetic. It may be that such a description applies to the recombining genes as well. While no chemical interaction appears between multiple sets of similar genes, it has been proposed that the reason the seek each other out has to do with the “complementary patterns of electrical charges which they both carry.”
The research team that made this discovery is already designing further sets of experiments to explore the interactions between genes. I’m sure they involve microscopes, and chemicals and things, but it seems to me that the scientists might benefit from thinking outside of the box in this area. Like, one might observe how genes interact if a wedding ring is placed over one section of the petri dish, and what changes when the ring is removed and accidentally washed down a sink. Or a similar experiment might be valuable, if they used a wad of cash instead of the ring, and then have the cash disappear in a foolish investment scheme. These are natural forces I can get my head around.
Template for life created out of lab chemicals
Mycoplasma genitalium
Courtesy Department of Energy Starting with simple laboratory chemicals, a group of scientists led by Craig Venter have replicated an entire bacterial genome. Based on an existing organism, the molecule of DNA Mycoplasma genitalium, composed of 582,970 base pairs, could come "alive" and start to replicate itself when inserted into a "hollow" bacterial host from which the DNA has been removed. The procedure titled, Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome was just published in Science.
"Venter and his colleagues have already managed to transplant the DNA from one bacteria into another, making it change species (see Genome transplant makes species switch/news070625-9). These bacteria were closely related to M. genitalium. If the transplant can be repeated with a man-made genome adapted from M. genitalium, the result could qualify as the first artificial life form (see 'What is artificial life?')" Nature News.
Customizing bacteria to solve problems
The genome of M. genitalium is one of the simplest, consisting of only 470 coding regions. Venter suspects about 100 of these are not necessary. The next step is to strip out various segments in an attempt to build the minimal amount of code that is essential for "life". This minimal component could then serve as a chassis to which "designer" genes could be attached, genes that could turn the bacteria into biological factories for making hydrogen (or other fuels).
Recommended reading:
Longest Piece of Synthetic DNA Yet (Scientific American)
DNA
"Hi all"
Is there a scientific body out there trying to re-const dinosuar dna and if so how far have they gone with there study.
Regards Gordon
A new study finds that obesity and over-eating may be caused by the lack of one single gene. (Though there are certainly other causes as well.)
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