Circadian rhythms can influence drugs' effectiveness
Giving drugs at different times of day could significantly affect how they are metabolized in the liver, according to a new study from MIT.
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Giving drugs at different times of day could significantly affect how they are metabolized in the liver, according to a new study from MIT.
5 hours ago
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Breast cancer is the second-most common cancer diagnosis for U.S. women, and the second-leading cause of female cancer deaths. In recent years, breast cancer treatments have improved significantly, thanks to targeted gene ...
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When pathogens invade the body, the immune system must react immediately to prevent or contain an infection. But how do our defense cells stay ready when no attacker is in sight?
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Scientists have long known that our brains are organized into specialized areas, each responsible for distinct tasks. The visual cortex processes what we see, for instance, while the motor cortex governs movement. But how ...
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A research team including scientists from the CNRS has discovered that cancer, one of the leading causes of death worldwide, can be caused entirely by epigenetic changes, in other words, changes that contribute to how gene ...
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Researchers at Texas Children's Cancer Center and the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children's Hospital and Houston Methodist have published results of a Phase I clinical trial of a ...
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Microbes in the mammalian gut can significantly change their hosts' amino acid and glucose metabolism, acting almost like an extra liver, according to a new preclinical study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.
Apr 23, 2024
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Within the last century, researchers' understanding of genetics has undergone a profound transformation.
Apr 23, 2024
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Metachromatic leukodystrophy is a rare genetic disorder that mainly affects young children and results in severe neurological symptoms accompanied by a loss of motor and intellectual capacities. At Paris Brain Institute, ...
Apr 22, 2024
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In a world with rapidly aging societies, there's a need for a detailed understanding of the cause and progression of diseases associated with aging. Skeletal muscle is the key motor system in the human body and plays a pivotal ...
Apr 22, 2024
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A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. A modern working definition of a gene is "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions " . In common usage, the term gene often refers to what is known more accurately as an allele.
The notion of a gene has evolved with the science of genetics, which began when Gregor Mendel noticed that biological variations are inherited from parent organisms as specific, discrete traits. The biological entity responsible for defining traits was termed a gene, but the biological basis for inheritance remained unknown until DNA was identified as the genetic material in the 1940s. All organisms have many genes corresponding to many different biological traits, some of which are immediately visible, such as eye color or number of limbs, and some of which are not, such as blood type or increased risk for specific diseases, or the thousands of basic biochemical processes that comprise life.
In cells, a gene is a portion of DNA that contains both "coding" sequences that determine what the gene does, and "non-coding" sequences that determine when the gene is active (expressed). When a gene is active, the coding and non-coding sequences are copied in a process called transcription, producing an RNA copy of the gene's information. This piece of RNA can then direct the synthesis of proteins via the genetic code. In other cases, the RNA is used directly, for example as part of the ribosome. The molecules resulting from gene expression, whether RNA or protein, are known as gene products, and are responsible for the development and functioning of all living things.
In more technical terms, a gene is a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, and is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions. The physical development and phenotype of organisms can be thought of as a product of genes interacting with each other and with the environment. A concise definition of a gene, taking into account complex patterns of regulation and transcription, genic conservation and non-coding RNA genes, has been proposed by Gerstein et al.: "A gene is a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products".
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA