New muscle repair gene discovered
An international team of researchers from Leeds, London and Berlin has discovered more about the function of muscle stem cells, thanks to next-generation DNA sequencing techniques.
Nov 20, 2011
0
0
An international team of researchers from Leeds, London and Berlin has discovered more about the function of muscle stem cells, thanks to next-generation DNA sequencing techniques.
Nov 20, 2011
0
0
A collaborative team of scientists led by Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine has discovered 15 additional genetic mutations in the KCNK9 gene that cause a neurodevelopmental syndrome. Symptoms of the disorder ...
Jun 21, 2022
0
547
Stem cell researchers at UCLA have generated the first genome-wide mapping of a DNA modification called 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) in embryonic stem cells, and discovered that it is predominantly found in genes that are ...
Jul 21, 2011
0
0
A newly discovered gene defect among people of Inuit ancestry in Greenland, Canada and Alaska will possibly lead to screening of all newborn Inuits as they will otherwise be at risk of dying from child vaccines or simple ...
Apr 26, 2022
0
41
New findings suggest that women with specific DNA characteristics in certain areas of the genome may live longer if they take aspirin before they are diagnosed with breast cancer. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed ...
Aug 12, 2019
0
394
Quick, accurate and easy-to-use, CRISPR-Cas9 has made genomic editing more efficient—but at the same time has made human germline editing much more feasible, erasing many of the ethical barriers erected to prevent scientists ...
(Medical Xpress)—One way cells promote tumor suppression is through a process called senescence, an irreversible arrest of proliferation. Senescence is thought to be associated with normal aging, but is also a protective ...
Aug 30, 2013
0
0
In 2009, the DNA alphabet expanded. Scientists discovered that an extra letter or "sixth nucleotide" was surprisingly abundant in DNA from stem cells and brain cells.
Oct 30, 2011
0
0
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have identified a key protein as the first dual-function co-regulator of an estrogen receptor that plays a crucial role in cancer development, opening the way to improved therapeutic ...
Aug 30, 2013
0
0
A paper published in the American Journal of Human Genetics proposes ATRIP gene variants as a breast cancer susceptibility gene candidate based on a study of women without any of the known breast cancer-associated gene variants.
A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. A modern working definition of a gene is "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions " . In common usage, the term gene often refers to what is known more accurately as an allele.
The notion of a gene has evolved with the science of genetics, which began when Gregor Mendel noticed that biological variations are inherited from parent organisms as specific, discrete traits. The biological entity responsible for defining traits was termed a gene, but the biological basis for inheritance remained unknown until DNA was identified as the genetic material in the 1940s. All organisms have many genes corresponding to many different biological traits, some of which are immediately visible, such as eye color or number of limbs, and some of which are not, such as blood type or increased risk for specific diseases, or the thousands of basic biochemical processes that comprise life.
In cells, a gene is a portion of DNA that contains both "coding" sequences that determine what the gene does, and "non-coding" sequences that determine when the gene is active (expressed). When a gene is active, the coding and non-coding sequences are copied in a process called transcription, producing an RNA copy of the gene's information. This piece of RNA can then direct the synthesis of proteins via the genetic code. In other cases, the RNA is used directly, for example as part of the ribosome. The molecules resulting from gene expression, whether RNA or protein, are known as gene products, and are responsible for the development and functioning of all living things.
In more technical terms, a gene is a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, and is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions. The physical development and phenotype of organisms can be thought of as a product of genes interacting with each other and with the environment. A concise definition of a gene, taking into account complex patterns of regulation and transcription, genic conservation and non-coding RNA genes, has been proposed by Gerstein et al.: "A gene is a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products".
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA