genes

What do the missing Romanov children, genetically engineered humans, financial risk taking, and poop have in common? You can read about all these topics from this month's Gene Genie carnival at Mary Meets Dolly. Who would have thought that mutations could be so much fun? Read more

One of the things that drives me crazy on occasion is nomenclature. Well, maybe not just nomenclature, it's really the continual changes in the nomenclature, and the time it takes for those changes to ripple through various databases and get reconciled with other kinds of information. And the realization that sometimes this reconciliation may never happen. One of the projects that I've been working on during the past couple of years has involved developing educational materials that use bioinformatics tools to look at the isozymes that metabolize alcohol. As part of this ... Read more

The New England Journal of Medicine published a study yesterday showing that small changes in the DNA in the long arm of chromosome 16 are associated with autism. I met a teenager with autism last summer, when I attended family night at the Seattle Park and Rec summer camp program for kids with special needs. It's a fantastic program. The kids spend a week or more at summer camp ... Read more