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Originally published by Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne on September 9, 2024 Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Every cell in our body contains the same DNA , yet liver cells are different from brain cells , and skin cells differ from muscle cells . What determines these differences? It all comes down to gene regulation ; essentially how and when genes are turned on and off to meet the cell's demands. But gene regulation is quite complex , especially because it is itself regulated by other parts of DNA . There are t wo important components that control gene regulation : the first are enhancers , which are short bits of DNA that increase the likelihood that a gene will be activated—even if that gene is far away from the enhancer on the genome. The second are specialized proteins , generally referred to as " transcription factors " ( TFs ), which bind to enhancers and, put crudely, control gene expression by "flipping" the genes' on/off swit...

Originally published by by Rose Miyatsu, University of California - Santa Cruz , on May 11, 2024 Shown is the splicing pathway. The pre-messenger RNA (pre-mRNA) has exons (blue) and introns (pink). The spliceosome (not shown) was known to catalyze two chemical reactions (black arrows) in a two-step process (green arrows labeled 1 and 2) that splice the exons together and removes the intron as a lariat. This study demonstrates that after splicing is finished, the spliceosome is still active and can convert the lariat intron into a circle using a third reaction (green arrow 3) marked by an asterix. Credit: Manuel Ares, UC Santa Cruz Although you may not appreciate them, or have even heard of them, throughout your body , countless microscopic machines called spliceosomes are hard at work . As you sit and read, they are faithfully and rapidly putting back together the broken information in your genes by removing sequences called " introns " so that your messenger RNAs can...

  Originally published by Center for Genomic Regulation, on April 15, 2024        The mayfly, one of the 20 species studied in the paper. Credit: Isabel Almudi Seven hundred million years ago , a remarkable creature emerged for the first time. Though it may not have been much to look at by today's standards, the animal had a front and a back, a top and a bottom . This was a groundbreaking adaptation at the time, and one which laid down the basic body plan which most complex animals , including humans , would eventually inherit . The inconspicuous animal resided in the ancient seas of Earth , likely crawling along the seafloor . This was the last common ancestor of bilaterians , a vast supergroup of animals including vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals), and invertebrates (insects, arthropods, mollusks, worms, echinoderms and many more). To this day, more than 7,000 groups of genes can be traced back to the last common ancest...

Originally published by The Ohio State University on November 13, 2023 Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A surprising thing happened when researchers began exploring whether early-life stress compounds the effects of a childhood head injury on health and behavior later in life . In an animal study, stress changed the activation level of many more genes in the brain than were changed by a bump to the head. It's already known that head injuries are common in young kids, especially from falling, and can be linked to mood disorders and social difficulties that emerge later in life. Adverse childhood experiences are also very common, and can raise risk for disease, mental illness and substance misuse in adulthood. "But we don't know how those two things can interact," said senior study author Kathryn Lenz , associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University . "We wanted to understand whether experiencing a traumatic brain injury in the c...