A-to-I RNA editing is an enzymatic reaction commonly found in the nervous system of various organisms. The mechanism behind this post-transcriptional modification is the hydrolytic deamination of Adenosine to Inosine by a family of enzymes known as...
Ahearn et al. (J. Heredity 93:210-213) have previously shown that the rat fuzzy and Charles River "hairless" mutations are defects in the same gene on rat Chromosome 1, and are likely orthologues of mouse frizzy (abbreviated fr) on mouse Chromosome...
Considering the pleiotropic manifestations of the rare, inherited, bone marrow failure disease, Fanconi Anemia, afflicted patients must be evaluated and monitored by specialty physicians (such as dermatologists, opthamologists, gastroenterologists,...
Cyclin D1 is the major regulator of cell cycle --- the division of cells to copy themselves. Cyclin D1 is the product of ccnd1 gene and plays an important role in regulation of cell cycle transition from G1 phase to S phase. The cell cycles of...
Discovering RNA editing sites in model organisms provides an insight into their adaptations in addition to finding potential sites for gene expression regulation. In this study, we focused on the grin1b gene of Zebrafish due to its important...
During the last decade, new technologies created a deluge of potential drug targets. Sifting through thousands of potential drug targets is a major industry bottleneck. Pharmaceutical companies can save billions of dollars by identifying most...
Infertility is a common problem, affecting approximately 10% of all couples attempting to conceive (Watson et al., 1998). Although numerous potential causes of human infertility exist, many cases are thought to have genetic etiologies, including...
Investigation of X-linked histocompatibility may offer an opportunity to find CD and HD minor H haplotype components which are widely separated on the X chromosome. The presence of the HX antigen is detected by placing parental strain grafts onto...
Myogenesis is an important process that occurs during the developmental stages of an embryo. Stem cells learn of their fate during this course if they will become muscle cells and from there, differentiation within those muscle cells will take...
Phylogeography using nested clade analysis (NCA) is able to apply biological inferences to the history of populations of organisms independent of the population's structure. In the Western United States, phrynosomatine lizards have a complex...
Rats lacking normal hairy coats were discovered several years ago among our colony of hairy albino rats. The trait was found to be controlled by a recessive allele of a gene we designated shorn (shn), which mapped to distal end of rat chromosome 7....
Receptor-mediated endocytosis as a route of gene delivery shows promise as it is a natural cellular process and allows targeting of ligands to specific cells. A carrier system consisting of two important components: a targetable ligand,...
RNA editing is a mechanism which is used to increase the number of possible protein products from a specific gene. The catalytic enzymes for RNA editing are known to be present in a wide variety of organisms, including many different insects. It...
The ability of embryonic stem cells to give rise to all cells comprising the three germ layers – endoderm, mesoderm and ectoderm – highlights a powerful in vivo system for the study of early embryonic development. Human embryonic stem cell...
DNA -- Analysis; Nucleotide sequence; Cancer genes
The first methods for sequencing DNA were developed in the mid-1970’s (Strausberg et al. 2008). The sequencing efforts were labor-intensive, slow, and costly (Metzker, 2005). As a result, researchers could sequence only a few base pairs per...
The frizzy (fr) mutation in Mus musculus affects hair structure and formation. Early studies demonstrated that the gene responsible for frizzy assorts to mouse Chromosome 7 along with pink-eyed dilution (p), chinchilla (cch), and shaker-1 (sh-1). ...
The male sterility and histoincompatibility mutant, mshi, results from a recessive mutation that arose spontaneously in the BALB/cBy inbred mouse strain. Using a 402-member BALB/cBy-mshi/mshi (BALB/cBy-mshi C57BL/6J) F1 backcross panel, the...
The male sterility and histoincompatibility mutation (mshi) is an autosomal recessive mutation that produces apparently pleiotropic effects in mice. Mice homozygous for mshi manifest two distinct phenotypes. In both male and female mice, the...
The mouse frizzy (fr) mutation arose on a genetically mixed background and was first described by G.D. Snell of The Jackson Laboratory in 1951. Mice carrying this recessive mutation have curly vibrissae which can be observed as early as one to two...
The mouse frizzy (fr) mutation is a Mendelian recessive trait that affects hair structure and formation in mice. The mutation arose in a mouse of mixed origin at the Jackson Lab (Bar Harbor, ME) in 1951. Frizzy is known to be linked to other genes...