DNA: How to unravel the tangle

A simulation unveils the structure and function of the chromosome tangle

2013-03-29

(Press-News.org) A research coordinated by the scientists at SISSA of Trieste has now developed and studied a numeric model of the chromosome that supports the experimental data and provides a hypothesis on the bundle's function.

A chromosome spends most of its life "diluted" in the nuclear cytoplasm. To the untrained eye it may look like a randomly entangled thread, yet biologists claim the opposite: although a chaotic component does exist in the bundle, experimental measurements have identified regions that tend to contain specific genes. Thanks to such measurements, researchers have obtained maps of the chromosome in its diluted form, the one in which the DNA transcription processes occur.

Cristian Micheletti, a physicist of SISSA, the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste, has coordinated an international research team - in which Marco Di Stefano and Angelo Rosa stand out - that has devised an ingenious method which, on one hand, has allowed to verify the already known experimental measures and, on the other, to find data in support of a theory which explains why the DNA bundle is arranged in regions. "Employing the vast amount of publicly available data on gene expression, we have identified families of genes co-regulated within a chromosome" explains Micheletti. The co-regulated genes codify "in accord", but how such synchronization occurs is a mystery, since often the genes are located very far from one another on the DNA filament. "Two main hypotheses may be considered: either 'messengers' exist that travel back and forth from one gene to the other and coordinate the activity, or the DNA filament folding up inside the tangle brings the genes belonging to the same family physically close."

On the basis of the second assumption Micheletti and his colleagues have used the computer to induce the DNA numeric model to bring the co-regulated genes closer. "The outcome of the simulation has provided a map of chromosome arrangement that is very close to the one obtained through experimentation," explains Micheletti. "Besides, the model has successfully brought closer the genes belonging to the same family, as we had asked for, in 80% of cases, that is without too much effort, which corroborates the validity of the hypothesis and the effectiveness of the simulation."

The article was chosen by PLOS Computational Biology journal as the cover story for the March issue.

INFORMATION:

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Teachers' gestures boost math learning

2013-03-29

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Students perform better when their instructors use hand gestures – a simple teaching tool that could yield benefits in higher-level math such as algebra. A study published in Child Development, the top-ranked educational psychology journal, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that gesturing may have a unique effect on learning. Teachers in the United States tend to use gestures less than teachers in other countries. "Gesturing can be a very beneficial tool that is completely free and easily employed in classrooms," said Kimberly Fenn, study ...

Smoking immediately upon waking may increase risk of lung and oral cancer

2013-03-29

The sooner a person smokes a cigarette upon waking in the morning, the more likely he or she is to acquire lung or oral cancer, according to Penn State researchers. "We found that smokers who consume cigarettes immediately after waking have higher levels of NNAL -- a metabolite of the tobacco-specific carcinogen NNK -- in their blood than smokers who refrain from smoking a half hour or more after waking, regardless of how many cigarettes they smoke per day," said Steven Branstetter, assistant professor of biobehavioral health. According to Branstetter, other research ...

Monounsaturated fats reduce metabolic syndrome risk

2013-03-29

Canola oil and high-oleic canola oils can lower abdominal fat when used in place of other selected oil blends, according to a team of American and Canadian researchers. The researchers also found that consuming certain vegetable oils may be a simple way of reducing the risk of metabolic syndrome, which affects about one in three U.S. adults and one in five Canadian adults. "The monounsaturated fats in these vegetable oils appear to reduce abdominal fat, which in turn may decrease metabolic syndrome risk factors," said Penny Kris-Etherton, Distinguished Professor of Nutrition, ...

NASA's Swift sizes up comet ISON

2013-03-29

VIDEO: Comet ISON is now approaching the inner solar system. Discovered last year, the comet remains unusually active for its distance from the sun. If current trends continue, ISON could rank... Click here for more information. Astronomers from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) and Lowell Observatory have used NASA's Swift satellite to check out comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), which may become one of the most dazzling in decades when it rounds the sun later this ...

Texas physician breaks ground in robotic cervical surgery

2013-03-29

Performing surgery on a pregnant patient is a delicate matter. Risks to both mother and baby must be carefully weighed in every decision a surgeon makes. Recently, at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, a surgeon performed a groundbreaking robotic laparoscopic procedure on a 35-year-old pregnant patient whose cervix was too short to sustain a pregnancy. VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtvVARBoxFw. PATIENT FEATURE STORY: http://www.utmb.edu/newsroom/article8400.aspx. Dr. Sami Kilic, chief of minimally invasive gynecology and research at UTMB, ...

LITHOSPHERE covers Canada, California, the Alps, and the Scandinavian Caledonides

2013-03-29

Boulder, Colo., USA - The April 2013 issue of Lithosphere is now available. Four classic research papers cover the Saint Elias Mountains of Yukon and British Columbia, Canada; the Nacimiento fault near San Simeon, California, USA; the western Alps; and the Caledonides in Scandinavia. An invited review relays the significance of dynamic topography to long-term sea level change. This month's research focus article, which is open access online, discusses the revolution in remote sensing-LiDAR-laser altimetry swath mapping. Abstracts are online at http://lithosphere.gsapubs.org/content/current. ...

Making do with more: Joint BioEnergy Institute researchers engineer plant cell walls to boost sugar yields for biofuels

2013-03-29

When blessed with a resource in overwhelming abundance it's generally a good idea to make valuable use of that resource. Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant organic material on Earth. For thousands of years it has been used as animal feed, and for the past two centuries has been a staple of the paper industry. This abundant resource, however, could also supply the sugars needed to produce advanced biofuels that can supplement or replace fossil fuels, providing several key technical challenges are met. One of these challenges is finding ways to more cost-effectively ...

UGA researchers track down gene responsible for short stature of dwarf pearl millet

2013-03-29

Athens, Ga. – While pearl millet is a major food staple in some of the fastest growing regions on Earth, relatively little is known about the drought-hardy grain. Recently, plant geneticists at the University of Georgia successfully isolated the gene that creates dwarfed varieties of pearl millet. It is the first time a gene controlling an important agronomic trait has been isolated in the pearl millet genome. Their work appeared in the March edition of the journal G3: Genes, Genomics, Genetics. The dwarf varieties are economically important in the U.S., India and ...

KAIST develops a low-power 60 GHz radio frequency chip for mobile devices

2013-03-29

Daejeon, Republic of Korea, March 29, 2013 -- As the capacity of handheld devices increases to accommodate a greater number of functions, these devices have more memory, larger display screens, and the ability to play higher definition video files. If the users of mobile devices, including smartphones, tablet PCs, and notebooks, want to share or transfer data on one device with that of another device, a great deal of time and effort are needed. As a possible method for the speedy transmission of large data, researchers are studying the adoption of gigabits per second ...

Robot ants successfully mimic real colony behavior

2013-03-29

Scientists have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources. The study focused mainly on how Argentine ants behave and coordinate themselves in ...

First observations by the Total Anthropogenic and Natural emissions mapping SpectrOmeter-3 (TANSO-3) onboard the Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle “IBUKI GW” (GOSAT-GW)

DNA: How to unravel the tangle

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: