Hoxful Monsters

Apologies for not updating the blog for past few days ,being in final year of p.hd it gets sometimes very difficult to get some time out for blog. Need to finish many experiments in order to get my project in some good shape. Lot of genetic experiments and also invitro stuff are keeping me busy.But will try to write some updates as many interesting things are coming up in the field of evolution and developmental biology. Today we will check some interesting articles and reviews which appeared last week …

The enormous diversity in body plan among the various organisms in animal kingdom is partly contributed by the Hox genes.Hox proteins regulate gene expression in different ways and thereby generating different body plans.Most of the organisms on earth have one or more clusters of Hox genes.These Hox genes pattern different segment and thus gives a unique identity by altering their expression patterns,their targets and their functional domains.
As you know hox genes dont act alone,mostly they function with other co factors.But the problem here is same co factor or factors are …

Homology mean any similarity between characters that is due to their shared ancestry.The term homologs looks simple theoretically but it’s important to get the various terms clear as it is one of the most important concept in biology.
Homologous features (”character”)–whether they be genes, mechanisms or morphologies–share an evolutionary history. That is,homologs share a character, from which they were derived, in an ancestor.The way the character looks (its “state”) is “primitive” if it looks like the ancestral character, and “derived” if it has changed from the ancestral state.
Orthologs and paralogs …

Homeotic genes/ Hox genes encode transcription factors, which play an important role in giving a unique identity to each segment and thereby setting up morphogenesis along the anterior posterior axis.They are recognizable by the presence of a 60 amino acid long DNA binding region called the homeodomain,but all homeo domain containing proteins are not hox genes.Hox genes exhibit some important properties like
1) Found in clusters: Hox genes are physically linked on the chromosome.Eight genes are organized in one cluster in flies(Drosophila) and four clusters harboring 39 hox genes …