Hoxful Monsters

The mother-daughter relationship can be difficult to understand. Why are the two so different? Now a Northwestern University study shows how this happens. In yeast cells, that is.
A research team has discovered a new mechanism for cell fate determination — how one cell, the daughter, becomes dramatically different from the mother, even though they have the same genetic material. The study shows why mothers and daughters differ in how they express their genes.
The results of this research will be published in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal PLoS Biology.

Going …

Genetics is a discipline initially worked out by Gregor Mendel (Austrian monk) using common pea plants in his garden.Since then many great minds used genetics to understand important problems of biology, including the study of evolution and how plants and animals develop. The power of genetics and its importance to mankind was first time recognized by the award of Nobel prize in Physiology or medicine in 1933 to T.H.Morgan . The role of his students, especially A.H.Sturtevant, C.B. Bridges and H.J.Muller was immense in making Drosophila, a powerful model system …

Drosophila happens to be my favourite animal ever since I first started working with them in 2001.This tiny arthropod has solved many biological puzzles ,thanks to various researchers working on fruit fly all over the world.Initially the word genetics might be scary for beginners as it involves complicated crosses and one need to remember various genotypes, marker associated with balancers and way to recognise them.But I can assure with some proper guidance and with will to learn makes learning Drosophila Genetics interesting to learn. Many books from various publishers …

The wide array of genetic tools available for Drosophila makes it one of popular eukaryotic model system to study numerous biological questions concerning development, genetics,evolution, cell biology, neuroscience and disease.We so far talked about UAS GAL4 system and P element mutagenesis and today we look into another very pivotal genetic tool used to study gene function.After the genome sequence of Drosophila was released in 2000,it has been realized that only 20% out of total(~13600 genes) could be identified by available techniques.The aim of present era of genomics …

There has been a long history of innovation and development of tools for gene discovery and genetic analysis in Drosophila melanogaster. This includes methods to induce mutations and to screen for those mutations that disrupt specific processes, methods to map mutations genetically and physically, and methods to clone and characterize genes at the molecular level.Modern genetics also requires techniques to do the reverse — to disrupt the functions of specific genes, the sequences of which are already known. This is the process referred to as reverse genetics.

–Melissa D. …

In some of the previous posts on Hoxful monsters we talked about Hox genes ,about their properties ,importance in anterior posterior patterning axis in Drosophila and we also seen how these Hox genes come into picture during early embryogenesis.Today we will briefly overview into one of fundamental question in the field of biology “How do Hox Proteins or transcription factors in general attain specificity invivo.
Hox genes codes for transcription factors which controls a development fate by regulating a cascade of downstream target genes.Hox proteins bind to DNA as monomer through …

In my post few days back we have looked into the biological classification of animals based on 18s RNA study and in this one we see what changes are in store when you do phylogenomics analysis.Modern evolutionary biology has come a long way from Linnaeus days to molecular phylogenetics (Field et al 1988 )(In this method: rRNA is the most conserved (least variable) gene in all cells For this reason, genes that encode the rRNA (rDNA) are sequenced to identify an organism’s taxonomic group, calculate related groups, and estimate …