July 16, 2008
Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans
Edward O. Wilson has become one of the world’s best-known biologists through his urge to create large syntheses of knowledge and his gift for writing.Edward O. Wilson has become one of the world’s best-known biologists through his urge to create large syntheses of knowledge and his gift for writing.40,000 years ago, the Cro-Magnoid people - the first people who had a skeleton that looked anatomically modern - entered Europe, coming from Africa. In the July 16 issue of the open-access journal PLoS ONE, a group of geneticists, coordinated by Guido Barbujani and David Caramelli of the Universities of Ferrara and Florence, shows that a Cro-Magnoid individual who lived in Southern Italy 28,000 years ago was a modern European, genetically as well as anatomically.
Research published in Nature Genetics by a team of international scientists including the University of Melbourne, Department of Zoology, has established an identical mechanism of genetic imprinting, a process involved in marsupial and human fetal development, which evolved 150 million years ago.
As frog populations die off around the world, researchers have identified certain genes that can help the amphibians develop resistance to harmful bacteria and disease. The discovery may provide new strategies to protect frog populations in the wild.
Genomatix Software, Inc. the US branch of Munich (Germany) based Genomatix Software GmbH, announced that it has reached an agreement with Pfizer Pharmaceuticals to provide Genomatix software and data content to Pfizer sites across the globe.
Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers have identified a set of genes in breast and colon cancers with a deadly combination of traditional mutations and "smothered" gene activity that may result in poor outcomes for patients.
