Patterns of Inheritance in Neurogenetic Disease

The human genome consists of approximately 22,000 genes that are encoded within the nuclear DNA and embedded in the chromosome. Mitochondria are the only cytoplasmic organelles that have their own DNA. Nuclear gene disorders and mitochondrial inheritance are discussed in this chapter. Nuclear gene disorders follow the patterns of inheritance originally described by Gregor Mendel. They often are referred to as single-gene disorders because 1 or more alleles of only 1 locus are the major determinants of phenotype.

Cell scientist to watch – Yasin Dagdas

ABSTRACT Yasin Dagdas studied biotechnology at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. In 2009, he moved to the UK to join the lab of Nicholas Talbot for his PhD at University of Exeter. There, he studied the role of cellular morphogenesis in the pathogenicity of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae. Yasin then did a postdoc with Sophien Kamoun from 2013–2016 at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, where he discovered how a plant pathogen effector has evolved to antagonize a host autophagy cargo receptor. In 2017, he established his own group at the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna. Research in his lab focusses on autophagy-mediated cellular quality control mechanisms in plants.

The Anomaly of Bacterial Genetics

This chapter reviews the research that set the stage for Joshua Lederberg’s surprising discovery of bacterial conjugation. While the foundational research of Gregor Mendel and his principles of inheritance had been effectively combined with Darwinian evolution, producing the Modern Synthesis in the mid-forties, bacteria did not fit into this grand synthesis. Most biologists believed that bacteria were too primitive to have real genes. But Delbruck, Hershey and Luria organized the Phage School, leading a novel approach to discovering the molecular biology of the gene by studying bacteriophages. Microbiologists like Tracy Sonneborn and Carl Lindegren turned to alternative microorganisms—protists, fungi, and yeast—to develop new model systems that offered advantages over the classical genetics organisms of animals and plants. The research of Edward Tatum and Jacques Monod indicated that mutations seemed to explain variation in bacteria. For many years, however, bacteriologists had known that bacteria reproduced by fission. The lack of any genetic hybridization seemed to argue against using bacteria to study basic genetic processes.

Potencial didáctico de la filatelia para estudiar Genética Mendeliana

Los sellos son el reflejo fidedigno de la historia y la cultura de la humanidad con un potencial didáctico aún por explorar. Aquí presento una experiencia docente que usa todos los sellos postales emitidos en honor a Gregor Mendel y los pertenecientes a series postales en las que este aparece (un total de 56 piezas de 13 países). Se elaboró un cuestionario con el que estudiantes de una asignatura de Genética básica de 2º curso del Grado en Biología trabajaron de forma autónoma la unidad temática de Análisis Genético Mendeliano. A continuación, se llevó a cabo una sesión de refuerzo para solventar las carencias detectadas tras la corrección de dicha actividad. Finalmente, se evaluó la experiencia usando una prueba tipo test de respuesta múltiple. Cuando las calificaciones obtenidas se compararon con las obtenidas por estudiantes de los cuatro cursos académicos anteriores que no habían utilizado este recurso, se obtuvo un incremento medio del 2,8% en las calificaciones (82,8% de respuestas correctas).

The people behind the papers – Ping Kao and Michael Nodine

ABSTRACT The application of single-cell mRNA sequencing technologies to plant embryos promises to reveal the gene expression dynamics underlying cell-type differentiation. A new paper in Development reports the generation of high-quality transcriptomes from single embryonic nuclei without contamination from maternal tissues. To find out more about the story, we caught up with first author Ping Kao and his supervisor Michael Nodine, who recently moved from the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna to become Assistant Professor in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan en experimenten in de klassieke genetica

Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan and experiments in classical geneticsIn the middle of the 19th century, Gregor Mendel performed a series of crosses with pea plants to investigate how hybrids are formed. Decades later, Thomas Hunt Morgan finalized the theory of classical genetics. An important aspect of Mendel’s and Morgan’s scientific approach is that they worked in a systematic, experimental fashion. But how did these experiments proceed? What is the relation between these experiments and Mendel’s and Morgan’s explanatory theories? What was their evidential value? Using present-day insights in the nature of experimentation I will show that the answer to these questions is fascinating but not obvious. Crossings in classical genetics lacked a crucial feature of traditional experiments for causal discovery: manipulation of the purported causes. Hence they were not traditional, ‘manipulative’ experiments, but ‘selective experiments’.