It comes down to the way the brain structures itself as it develops.
Okay, but this article misses out the best part:
Muotri has developed the modern human brain organoids to the stage where his team can detect oscillating electrical signals within the balls of tissue. They are now wiring the organoids to robots that resemble crabs, hoping the organoids will learn to control the robots’ movements. Ultimately, Muotri wants to pit them against robots run by brain Neanderoids.
A promiscuous salamander has found a simple genetic formula for success: Mate with multiple males and use equal parts of each partner’s genetic material in her offspring.
A University of Iowa-led team of biologists analyzed the genome of an Ambystoma, a six-million-year-old salamander lineage that produces only female offspring. The team found most of its genetic profile is made up of equal contributions from males of three separate salamander species—Ambystoma laterale, Ambystoma texanum, and Ambystoma tigrinum.
The researchers think the all-female salamander’s balanced genome points to the bizarre ways some animals—from all-female populations of fish, lizards, and others—can use their genomes to maximize their chances of success…
One of my favorite things about biology is that there are so many diagrams like this that look like shitposts if you remove any and all context from them
I FOUND MY FAVORITE VIDEO FROM BIOLOGY CLASS IN HIGH SCHOOL
Also, while this is on my mind. In my master’s-level food toxicology class today we discussed various genetically modified crops and watched part of a documentary about them, and as someone with a food science degree I would like to be clear about the following:
The only health risk that has been shown to us throughout twenty plus years of having genetically modified crops as part of the food system is that there is a possibility of introducing proteins that could cause allergic reactions. New strains are required to be tested for this, of course, but that is a practical risk that needs to be closely monitored.
The objection to GM in general should be the patenting of genes and other legal matters; there are a number of crops that have been saved from blight and overall extinction via modification in the past two decades, and much like putting up inaccessibly expensive paywalls to scientific journals, patenting of genes within crops limits our ability within universities, small research companies, etc to make significant breakthroughs to further the scientific progress of humanity.
Furthermore. People think of organic crops as the environmentally-friendly option. If you believe this, please pay attention to what I’m about to say. Current regulations dictate that to have a crop classified as organic the land on which the crop is grown has to have been pesticide-free for a significant amount of time. There is no interim label available to farmers. So what do they do? Do they use no pesticides and take the losses from disease and insects for a decade, waiting for a time in which they are allowed to reclassify their crops in such a way that they can sell them for more money?
Of course they don’t. It isn’t practical. You can say what you like about how the system is structured; I’d personally like to see an interim classification come into play. But what farmers actually do, and states like Montana are feeling the full effects of this–they clear-cut forests and plant their organic crops on entirely new land.
You want to tell me that clear-cutting forests is environmentally friendly? It’s not. Hell, for all that people make a big deal about saving the environment by limiting how much paper they use, paper production is done in a more sustainable manner (because the paper farms replant their trees in a regular cycle so as to not deplete their sources; they don’t just go out and cut down random trees).
There are objections to be had in regards to GM crops on a legal basis. On a scientific one, there isn’t much. Call them frankenfoods all you want; look up what most commercially-sold produce truly looks like in the wild with no modification and you will learn very quickly that all foods have been modified in some way over the years through conventional breeding. We just think of that differently.
Biotechnology is not the enemy. Pseudoscience tells us that this is the case. Pseudoscience also tells us that we should seek out natural supplements instead of medicine, and, well… that’s a rant for another day, but suffice to say it’s an even more dubious proposition.
Don’t buy into it.
Australian and Swedish researchers have determined that sustainability (how long the horse can keep racing without illness or injury) is just as heritable a trait as performance. And while environmental factors, such as nutrition and training, also shape sustainability and performance, the genetic influences are there, said Brandon D. Velie, BSc, MSc, PhD, a researcher in the Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in Uppsala, who was previously with the University of Sydney, in Australia.
“I don’t know of anyone in the industry who doesn’t think winning performance is heritable, and sustainability is no more complex than winning performance,” Velie said. “The industry has had great success with breeding for performance and, if united in their effort, would likely be just as successful in improving the sustainability of the breed.”
Velie and colleagues at the University of Sydney examined the racing records and bloodlines of 168,993 horses racing in Australia and Hong Kong. They looked at the heritability of several elements related to sustainability, such as the length of the horse’s racing career (longevity), the number of events the horse raced in (persistence), and how many spells (breaks of longer than 90 days between performance events) the horse had.
They found that racing longevity, racing persistence, racing frequency, spells per year, spells per 10 starts, and the variation of days between races were all significantly heritable traits, Velie said.
The results give support for “the successful and practical application of genetic selection methodologies” that could improve the lives of racehorses, their report concluded.
Some breeders are already practicing the science of breeding to eliminate the risk for certain injuries or illnesses, Velie said. But an overall sustainability approach makes more sense, as it’s obviously better for equine welfare. Horses that succumb to the physical and emotional stress of racing are often very young, usually no more than 6 years old, and sometimes never fully recover, he said. Better sustainability keeps them healthier longer and gives them the chance for a second career in leisure or sport once their racing careers are over.
Breeding for sustainability in addition to performance also keeps horses on the track longer—which is better for the owner’s investment, Velie added.
“If I were a breeder, I’d be seriously considering sustainability (in addition to speed, of course) in my breeding decisions,” he said. “After all, how many breeders can say that on average every horse that they have bred races for at least three, four, or perhaps even five years?”
In fact, aiming for sustainability in racehorses could on a broader scale help the industry’s image as a whole, said Velie, pointing to the darling of the U.S. Thoroughbred industry as an example.
“Longer careers for horses (even if only by six months) will likely increase field sizes, and, as we’ve seen with American Pharoah, the longer a horse is around, the more likely the industry will recruit new fans,” said Velie.
In 2015, the now 4-year-old colt became the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years and the first horse to win the “Grand Slam”—the Triple Crown plus the Breeders’ Cup Classic in the same year.
“While American Pharoah isn’t very old, he clearly demonstrates what can happen when a country gets captivated by a single horse,” Velie said. “That’s very hard to do with very short racing careers and even more difficult to do when injured horses are what comes to mind when the average person thinks of the racing industry.”
Equine sustainability and further genetic research are keys to the future of Thoroughbred breeding, for welfare, economics, and the sustainability of horse racing in general, Velie relayed.
“We need to remain open-minded about what genetic research can do for the horse racing industry,” he said. “Genetic and genomic technologies are continuing to advance at an incredibly fast rate, and those industries who remain closed off to genetic research are undoubtedly going to be left behind.”
The study, “Heritability of racing durability traits in the Australian and Hong Kong Thoroughbred racing populations,” will appear in an upcoming issue of the Equine Veterinary Journal.
New ‘Hybrid’ Tomatoes
Part of a Series: #Marketing with Plants
Talking about new products in the horticultural and agricultural worlds is a bit like a game of telephone: a concept is set loose in the world, and then by some perverse combination of marketing, bad journalism, and re-shares on social media, a merely grafted tomato plant becomes some sort of miraculous new ‘hybrid.’ It’s kind of like the Science News Cycle.
The worst manifestation of this ‘trickle-down discourse’ is the GMO conversation, where “drinking a shot glass full of glyphosate herbicide might land you in the hospital,” turns into “GMO crops will give your children autism.”
But this general confusion about food production and plant life manifests in more banal ways: as it has with the 'Pomato,’ a.k.a. 'Ketchup n’ Fries,’ a.k.a. ’TomTato,’ a.k.a. ’Tomoffel’ a.k.a. ’DoubleUP Potato Tom’ tomato/potato plant, and the ’Black and White’ tomato.
Hybrid tomatoes do, of course, exist. They are usually bred for traits like disease resistance, size, uniformity, and shelf life. A true hybrid will often be annotated with F1 (Filial 1 hybrid) or F2 (Filial 2 hybrid): direct from the supplier, these seeds will produce uniform offspring, but seeds that are self-harvested thereafter will not produce true-to-type. That is the big difference between hybrid and heirloom seeds: hybrids will perform well for one season, and heirlooms will perform in perpetuity. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. [x]
The two greenhouse novelties above, however, are mere grafts, resulting in what would properly be called a “chimera” (because the resulting organism retains two genetically distinct tissues). Grafting is a practice that has been used in horticulture for at least 2000 years. What’s more, these are grafts you can do at home with a little research, instead of shelling out 5x the price of a normal tomato at a nursery.
The 'Pomato’ is usually a graft between a cherry tomato, and a potato plant. These plants are both a part of the Nightshade (Solanaceae) family, which also includes tobacco, eggplant, pepino dulce, ground cherries, tomatillos, petunias, peppers, and deadly nightshade. Their botanical closeness means that certain cultivars will have compatible tissues, and can therefore share nutrients and water if their vascular tissues are joined.
The 'Black and White’ tomato is a graft between the famous anthocyanin-abundant Indigo Rose tomato, and a White Cherry tomato. Grafting tomatoes is an excellent strategy for saving space, imparting disease resistance, or increasing vigour: one that I would recommend every home gardener try.
More: In Defense of Grafting Tomatoes
When you harvest seeds from these grafted plants (unless the tomato itself is planted from hybrid seed), they will be true to the original type that was planted before the graft took place. The plant is still genetically the same as it was before the graft.
Even in the case of what was formerly called a “graft hybrid”–where the grafted tissues blend together–genetically distinct reproductive cells are maintained, so the resulting plant is now correctly-termed a graft-chimaera, rather than a graft-hybrid.
There is no doubt that these are exciting and novel products, but they certainly aren’t miraculous: with a little practice, you could be making them for free!
You've got me infinitely curious now. Do you have any examples of things that are completely neutral to survival and thus left to chance evolution-wise?
Mmmmmmyes and no. The issue here is that it’s really really hard to definitively say “yes, this phenotypic trait is absolutely neutral” about anything. How could this be tested, given infinite possible scenarios and individual differences?
However, it might be possible to identify more-or-less neutral traits by looking at the genetic drift in a population over time. Alleles that never become fixed but never go away are arguably neutral just by subtracting their negative impact from their positive impact. (I.e., polymorphisms, evolutionarily stable strategies, and the like.)
It is possible for a so-called neutral allele to become fixed in the population simply by chance: a population bottleneck could leave only those members with the allele surviving, or members of the population with the allele could be isolated from the others (the founder effect).
Genetic hitchiking of linked genes is another factor. The placement of genes on chromosomes matters more than you might think. Say we have an allele that is very valuable and under the influence of positive selection. It might be nestled between two genes of neutral value on the chromosome- this means that those genes are significantly more likely to spread through the population purely due to their proximity to that one popular guy.
Many of these ‘neutral’ genes won’t ever show up in the phenotype (i.e., be physically represented) and become yet another instance of noncoding junk DNA. In fact, the human genome is about 98% junk, which is somewhat unsurprising. However, this is a bit peripheral to your question, because junk DNA by nature codes for no actual traits. (Also, it’s arguably not completely neutral- even junk costs something to produce!)
All of this is part of an interesting and frustrating subsection of genetics called neutral evolution. You’d think scientists wouldn’t bother devoting much time to this arguably pointless phenomenon- but you’d be wrong! Examining the drift of neutral genes is actually one of the best tools for determining the length of time between the appearance of different species. Because neutral genes aren’t affected by selection, they change at more or less a constant rate over time.
This is a fairly simple description of a highly complex phenomenon with more math to it than I can comprehend, so I highly suggest you research it yourself if you find it interesting!
Scientists have developed a method for editing the genes of practically any plant or animal. This method, known as CRISPR, allows researchers to fix genetic defects that cause disease in humans, for example. However, modified genes are spreading through entire populations faster than researchers thought possible and this poses serious biological risks, according to a new study.
Researchers from Cornell University developed a mathematical model that identifies “gene drive” or how quickly and extensively one of these modified genes spreads throughout a population, according to Business Insider.
To test their model, researchers introduced a mutation, or allele, into a few individual fruit flies. Introducing an allele allows researchers to control malaria in mosquitos and pesticide resistance in plants, for example. However, the rate at which the allele spread suggests the gene editing system could spread to unintended species, according to the Cornell Chronicle.
“The time for these CRISPR alleles to spread and become fixed in a population is on the order of tens of generations,” Rob Unckless, first author of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, told the Cornell Chronicle. “That’s incredibly fast.”
When a mosquito with a gene drive mates with a wild-type mosquito, the CRISPR mutation (blue) can potentially spread quickly through a population. (Photo : Cornell Chronicle )
“Ever wonder how your food would be without any human intervention over the course of agriculture history? For thousands of years, farmers have manipulated their crops to get the best yields and have resulted in many of the produce you see today. Also, it’s informative to note that more than 3000 grains, fruits and vegetables have been “created” in a laboratory by subjecting them with gamma rays and/or highly toxic chemicals to artificially scramble their DNA–and have since been marketed as organic, including Ruby Red grapefruits and almost of the most flavorful and top selling organic Italian pasta. Read about that here: Pasta? Ruby grapefruits? Why organic devotees love foods mutated by radiation and chemicals.”
(Source: Genetic Literacy Project via @MatthewPope on Twitter)
On April 24, 2003, shortly after the completion of the human genome project, its director Francis Collins and his team posed 15 grand challenges to the scientific community. They dared researchers to harness the genome to crack puzzles of biology, health, and society. In particular, they called for genome-based tools to close health disparities. Since then, the United States has pumped more than $1 billion a year into genomics research. What do we have to show for it?
“What we found in the literature published from 2007 to 2013 was basically nothing,†said Jay Kaufman, the lead author of the first study to examine available genetic data for evidence that explains a major racial-health disparity. For many years, researchers speculated that what they couldn’t explain about disparities must be the fingerprint of some mysterious genetic component. But since they are now able to scan the entire genome, this speculation appears both lazy and wrong. When it comes to why many black people die earlier than white people in the U.S., Kaufman and his colleagues show we’ve been looking for answers in the wrong places: We shouldn’t be looking in the twists of the double helix, but the grinding inequality of the environment.
It is no secret that a longer life is a white privilege in the U.S. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that white men lived more than four years longer than black men, and white women lived more than three years longer than black women. The main reason for the racial mortality gap is heart disease. “There’s a huge number of years of life lost because some people have the black life expectancy and not the white life expectancy,†Kaufman said. “It’s killing people prematurely on the basis of race.â€
Why hasn’t attention turned, then, to social inequality, not genetics, as the source of health disparities? The main reason is the political ramification. “If you show that this is a predisposition that is genetically determined—black people just have this gene, there’s nothing we can do about it, this is just nature—then society is completely absolved. We don’t have any responsibility to solve this problem,†Kaufman said. “If you show that it is because of racism and injustice and people’s living conditions, well, then, there is some responsibility and we have to do something about this.â€
In his book Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and Inequality, Michael Montoya shows how epidemiologists try to explain diabetes through genetics, even if evidence points in a social direction: lifestyle disruptions, dispossession, and poverty, which disproportionately affect minorities. “It is much easier to say it must be something [wrong] with those people than it is [to say something’s wrong] with the way we have arranged our society,†Montoya told me.
It is depressing how this is news. There are articles from the ‘80s (and not just from social scientists) that argue against a genetic explanation for racial differences in epidemiology.Â
Duh.
Once again, big expensive study is done to prove something ANY Black American could’ve told the researchers.
Some people, to this day, believe GE papayas are dangerous. They want more studies. They’ll always want more studies. They call themselves skeptics. But when you cling to an unsubstantiated belief, even after two decades of research and experience, that’s not skepticism. It’s dogma. Twenty years after the debut of genetically engineered food, it’s a travesty that the technology’s commercial applications are still so focused on old-fashioned weedkillers. Greenpeace and Chipotle think the logical response to this travesty is to purge GMOs. They’re exactly wrong. The relentless efforts of Luddites to block testing, regulatory approval, and commercial development of GMOs are major reasons why more advanced GE products, such as Golden Rice, are still unavailable. The best way to break the herbicide industry’s grip on genetic engineering is to support the technology and push it forward, by telling policymakers, food manufacturers, and seed companies that you want better GMOs The USDA’s catalog of recently engineered plants shows plenty of worthwhile options. The list includes drought-tolerant corn, virus-resistant plums, non-browning apples, potatoes with fewer natural toxins, and soybeans that produce less saturated fat. A recent global inventory by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization discusses other projects in the pipeline: virus-resistant beans, heat-tolerant sugarcane, salt-tolerant wheat, disease-resistant cassava, high-iron rice, and cotton that requires less nitrogen fertilizer. Skim the news, and you’ll find scientists at work on more ambitious ideas: high-calcium carrots, antioxidant tomatoes, nonallergenic nuts, bacteria-resistant oranges, water-conserving wheat, corn and cassava loaded with extra nutrients, and a flaxlike plant that produces the healthy oil formerly available only in fish. That’s what genetic engineering can do for health and for our planet. The reason it hasn’t is that we’ve been stuck in a stupid, wasteful fight over GMOs. On one side is an army of quacks and pseudo-environmentalists waging a leftist war on science. On the other side are corporate cowards who would rather stick to profitable weed-killing than invest in products that might offend a suspicious public. The only way to end this fight is to educate ourselves and make it clear to everyone—European governments, trend-setting grocers, fad-hopping restaurant chains, research universities, and biotechnology investors—that we’re ready, as voters and consumers, to embrace nutritious, environmentally friendly food, no matter where it got its genes. We want our GMOs. Now, show us what you can do.
by Ferris Jabr
Long ago, hornworts did something plants are not supposed to do: they breached the species barrier, trading DNA with an entirely different kind of plant – a fern.
Between 300 and 130 million years ago, as trees and flowering plants grew to dominate the globe, the sun-loving ferns of yore found themselves trapped beneath forest canopies. Most fern species perished under this umbrage, but the ones that survived learned to live on lean light. These persistent plants evolved a molecule called neochrome that could detect both red and blue light, helping them stretch towards any beams that managed to filter through the dense awning of leaves.
Neochrome’s origins have long eluded scientists. As far as anyone knew, the gene that codes for neochrome existed in only two types of plants separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution: ferns and algae. It was extremely unlikely that the gene had been passed down from a common ancestor, yet somehow skipped over every plant lineage between algae and ferns.
About two years ago, while searching through a new massive database of sequenced plant genomes, Fay Wei-Li, a biologist at Duke University, found a near-exact match for the neochrome gene in a group of plants not previously known to possess the light-sensitive protein: hornworts. Through subsequent DNA analysis of living specimens – like those he collected in Florida – Li confirmed his suspicion: ferns did not evolve neochrome on their own; rather, they took the gene from hornworts…
(read more: Aeon.co)
This puts another wrench in the GMOs are ‘unnatural‘ argument.
Human genome includes ‘foreign’ genes not from our ancestors
Many animals, including humans, acquired essential ‘foreign’ genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times, according to research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study challenges the conventional view that animal evolution relies solely on genes passed down through ancestral lines and suggests that, at least in some lineages, the process is still ongoing.
