Who coined the term genome?
Hans Winkler
Hans Karl Albert Winkler (23 April 1877 – 22 November 1945) was a German botanist. He was Professor of Botany at the University of Hamburg, and a director of that university's Institute of Botany. Winkler coined the term 'heteroploidy' in 1916. He is remembered for coining the term 'genome' in 1920, by making a portmanteau of the words gene and chromosome. He wrote: 
This may be translated as: "I propose the expression "Genom" for the haploid chromosome set, which, together with the pertinent protoplasm, specifies the material foundations of the species ..."
Paleontology
Increasing awareness of Gregor Mendel's pioneering work in genetics led first to the development of population genetics and then in the mid-20th century to the modern evolutionary synthesis, which explains evolution as the outcome of events such as mutations and horizontal gene transfer, which provide genetic variation, with genetic drift and natural selection driving changes in this variation over time. Within the next few years the role and operation of DNA in genetic inheritance were discovered, leading to what is now known as the "Central Dogma" of molecular biology. In the 1960s molecular phylogenetics, the investigation of evolutionary "family trees" by techniques derived from biochemistry, began to make an impact, particularly when it was proposed that the human lineage had diverged from apes much more recently than was generally thought at the time. Although this early study compared proteins from apes and humans, most molecular phylogenetics research is now based on comparisons of RNA and DNA.
Genetics in fiction
Modern genetics began with the work of the monk Gregor Mendel in the 19th century, on the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel found that visible traits, such as whether peas were round or wrinkled, were inherited discretely, rather than by blending the attributes of the two parents. In 1900, Hugo de Vries and other scientists rediscovered Mendel's research; William Bateson coined the term "genetics" for the new science, which soon investigated a wide range of phenomena including mutation (inherited changes caused by damage to the genetic material), genetic linkage (when some traits are to some extent inherited together), and hybridisation (crosses of different species).
Meme
The word "meme" originated with Richard Dawkins' 1976 book "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins cites as inspiration the work of geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist F. T. Cloak and ethologist J. M. Cullen. Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission—in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. Although Dawkins invented the term 'meme' and developed meme theory, the possibility that ideas were subject to the same pressures of evolution as were biological attributes was discussed in Darwin's time. T. H. Huxley claimed that 'The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.'
Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.
History of genetics
A series of subsequent discoveries led to the realization decades later that the genetic material is made of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). In 1941, George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum showed that mutations in genes caused errors in specific steps in metabolic pathways. This showed that specific genes code for specific proteins, leading to the "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis. Oswald Avery, Colin Munro MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty showed in 1944 that DNA holds the gene's information. In 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling produced a strikingly clear x-ray diffraction pattern indicating a helical form, and in 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick demonstrated the molecular structure of DNA. Together, these discoveries established the central dogma of molecular biology, which states that proteins are translated from RNA which is transcribed by DNA. This dogma has since been shown to have exceptions, such as reverse transcription in retroviruses.
Genetics
The observation that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding. The modern science of genetics, seeking to understand this process, began with the work of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century.
Genetics
The importance of Mendel's work did not gain wide understanding until 1900, after his death, when Hugo de Vries and other scientists rediscovered his research. William Bateson, a proponent of Mendel's work, coined the word "genetics" in 1905 (the adjective "genetic", derived from the Greek word "genesis"—γένεσις, "origin", predates the noun and was first used in a biological sense in 1860). Bateson both acted as a mentor and was aided significantly by the work of female scientists from Newnham College at Cambridge, specifically the work of Becky Saunders, Nora Darwin Barlow, and Muriel Wheldale Onslow. Bateson popularized the usage of the word "genetics" to describe the study of inheritance in his inaugural address to the Third International Conference on Plant Hybridization in London in 1906.
History of evolutionary thought
The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's laws of inheritance in 1900 ignited a fierce debate between two camps of biologists. In one camp were the Mendelians, who were focused on discrete variations and the laws of inheritance. They were led by William Bateson (who coined the word "genetics") and Hugo de Vries (who coined the word "mutation"). Their opponents were the biometricians, who were interested in the continuous variation of characteristics within populations. Their leaders, Karl Pearson and Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, followed in the tradition of Francis Galton, who had focused on measurement and statistical analysis of variation within a population. The biometricians rejected Mendelian genetics on the basis that discrete units of heredity, such as genes, could not explain the continuous range of variation seen in real populations. Weldon's work with crabs and snails provided evidence that selection pressure from the environment could shift the range of variation in wild populations, but the Mendelians maintained that the variations measured by biometricians were too insignificant to account for the evolution of new species.
George M. Church
To aid in the interpretation and sharing of genomes, Church, in 2005, initiated the Personal Genome Project (PGP), which provides the world’s only open-access human genome and trait data sets. Eight trios (mother, father, and child) from the Personal Genome Project are in the process of being chosen to act as the primary genome standards (Reference Materials) for the NIST+FDA genomeinabottle.org program.
Memetics
The term "meme" derives from the Ancient Greek μιμητής ("mimētḗs"), meaning "imitator, pretender". The similar term "mneme" was used in 1904, by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon, best known for his development of the engram theory of memory, in his work "Die mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen", translated into English in 1921 as "The Mneme" . Until Daniel Schacter published "Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory" in 2000, Semon's work had little influence, though it was quoted extensively in Erwin Schrödinger’s prescient 1956 Tarner Lecture “Mind and Matter”. Richard Dawkins (1976) apparently coined the word "meme" independently of Semon, writing this:
"'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même."
History of agricultural science
In 1900, Hugo de Vries published his findings after rediscovering Mendel's work, and in 1905 William Bateson coined the term "genetics" in a letter to Adam Sedgwick. The study of genetics carried into an experiment isolating DNA.
Jérôme Lejeune
In a 1963 presentation before the French Academy of Sciences, Lejeune showed that monosomy—the absence of a specific segment of the genome—could also result in a clinically recognizable disease. Several years later, a group of American scientists came to Paris to conduct an independent investigation of
Lejeune’s discovery, and in 1962 the President of the United States personally presented him with the Kennedy
Prize. In 1964, the first chair of human genetics was created at the Paris School of Medicine, and
Lejeune was named to fill it. The appointment was highly unusual: Only a groundbreaking discovery allowed a
candidate to be named a professor of medicine without successfully completing a competitive residency
examination.
Richard Dawkins
In his book "The Selfish Gene", Dawkins coined the word "meme" (the behavioural equivalent of a gene) as a way to encourage readers to think about how Darwinian principles might be extended beyond the realm of genes. It was intended as an extension of his "replicators" argument, but it took on a life of its own in the hands of other authors, such as Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore. These popularisations then led to the emergence of memetics, a field from which Dawkins has distanced himself.
James V. Neel
James Van Gundia Neel (March 22, 1915 – February 1, 2000) was an American geneticist who played a key role in the development of human genetics as a field of research in the United States. He made important contributions to the emergence of genetic epidemiology and pursued an understanding of the influence of environment on genes. In his early work, he studied sickle-cell disease and conducted research on the effects of radiation on survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. In 1956, Neel established the University of Michigan Department of Genetics, the first department of human genetics at a medical school in the United States. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.
Genome size
The term "genome size" is often erroneously attributed to Hinegardner, even in discussions dealing specifically with terminology in this area of research (e.g., Greilhuber, 2005). Notably, Hinegardner used the term only once: in the title. The term actually seems to have first appeared in 1968 when Hinegardner wondered, in the last paragraph of his article, whether "cellular DNA content does, in fact, reflect genome size". In this context, "genome size" was being used in the sense of genotype to mean the number of genes. In a paper submitted only two months later (in February 1969), Wolf et al. (1969) used the term "genome size" throughout and in its present usage; therefore these authors should probably be credited with originating the term in its modern sense. By the early 1970s, "genome size" was in common usage with its present definition, probably as a result of its inclusion in Susumu Ohno's influential book "Evolution by Gene Duplication", published in 1970.
Robert Feulgen
Joachim Wilhelm Robert Feulgen (2 September 1884 – 24 October 1955) was a German physician and chemist who, in 1914, developed a method for staining DNA (now known as the Feulgen stain) and who also discovered plant and animal nuclear DNA (""thymonucleic acid"") congeniality.
Plasmid
The term "episome" was introduced by François Jacob and Élie Wollman in 1958 to refer to extra-chromosomal genetic material that may replicate autonomously or become integrated into the chromosome. Since the term was introduced, however, its use has shifted, as "plasmid" has become the preferred term for autonomously replicating extrachromosomal DNA. At a 1968 symposium in London some participants suggested that the term "episome" be abandoned, although others continued to use the term with a shift in meaning.
Social genome
There have been two distinct uses of the term. First, the word Social Genome was used in a letter to the editor submission to Science in response to a seminal article about using big data for social science by King. The letter was published, but the word social genome was edited out of the letter. The original submission states, “A well-integrated federated data system of administrative databases updated on an ongoing basis could hold a collective representation of our society, our social genome.” Kum and others continue to use the word since 2011, with it being defined in a peer reviewed article in 2013. It states “Today there is a constant flow of data into, out of, and between ever-larger and ever-more complex databases about people. Together, these digital traces collectively capture our social genome, the footprints of our society.” In 2014, a vision paper on population informatics was published which further elaborated on the term.
Gene
Early work in molecular genetics suggested the concept that one gene makes one protein. This concept (originally called the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis) emerged from an influential 1941 paper by George Beadle and Edward Tatum on experiments with mutants of the fungus "Neurospora crassa". Norman Horowitz, an early colleague on the "Neurospora" research, reminisced in 2004 that “these experiments founded the science of what Beadle and Tatum called "biochemical genetics". In actuality they proved to be the opening gun in what became molecular genetics and all the developments that have followed from that.” The one gene-one protein concept has been refined since the discovery of genes that can encode multiple proteins by alternative splicing and coding sequences split in short section across the genome whose mRNAs are concatenated by trans-splicing.
Biochemistry
Another significant historic event in biochemistry is the discovery of the gene, and its role in the transfer of information in the cell. This part of biochemistry is often called molecular biology. In the 1950s, James D. Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins were instrumental in solving DNA structure and suggesting its relationship with genetic transfer of information. In 1958, George Beadle and Edward Tatum received the Nobel Prize for work in fungi showing that one gene produces one enzyme. In 1988, Colin Pitchfork was the first person convicted of murder with DNA evidence, which led to the growth of forensic science. More recently, Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello received the 2006 Nobel Prize for discovering the role of RNA interference (RNAi), in the silencing of gene expression.
Connectome
In 2005, Dr. Olaf Sporns at Indiana University and Dr. Patric Hagmann at Lausanne University Hospital independently and simultaneously suggested the term "connectome" to refer to a map of the neural connections within the brain. This term was directly inspired by the ongoing effort to sequence the human genetic code—to build a genome.
William Bateson
William Bateson (8 August 1861 – 8 February 1926) was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. His 1894 book "Materials for the Study of Variation" was one of the earliest formulations of the new approach to genetics.
Metagenomics
The term "metagenomics" was first used by Jo Handelsman, Jon Clardy, Robert M. Goodman, Sean F. Brady, and others, and first appeared in publication in 1998. The term metagenome referenced the idea that a collection of genes sequenced from the environment could be analyzed in a way analogous to the study of a single genome. Recently, Kevin Chen and Lior Pachter (researchers at the University of California, Berkeley) defined metagenomics as "the application of modern genomics technique without the need for isolation and lab cultivation of individual species".
GENCODE
The definition of a "gene" has never been a trivial issue, with numerous definitions and notions proposed throughout the years since the discovery of the human genome. First, genes were conceived in the 1900s as discrete units of heredity, then it was thought as the blueprint for protein synthesis, and in more recent times, it was being defined as genetic code that is transcribed into RNA. Although the definition of a gene has evolved greatly over the last century, it has remained a challenging and controversial subject for many researchers. With the advent of the ENCODE/GENCODE project, even more problematic aspects of the definition have been uncovered, including alternative splicing (where a series of exons are separated by introns), intergenic transcriptions, and the complex patterns of dispersed regulation, together with non-genic conservation and the abundance of noncoding RNA genes. As GENCODE endeavours to build an encyclopaedia of genes and gene variants, these problems presented a mounting challenge for the GENCODE project to come up with an updated notion of a gene.
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson notably coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel "Neuromancer" (1984). These early works have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature.
Genome (disambiguation)
Genome is the totality of genetic material carried by an organism.
Human genetics
Genomics refers to the field of genetics concerned with structural and functional studies of the genome. A genome is all the DNA contained within an organism or a cell including nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. The human genome is the total collection of genes in a human being contained in the human chromosome, composed of over three billion nucleotides. In April 2003, the Human Genome Project was able to sequence all the DNA in the human genome, and to discover that the human genome was composed of around 20,000 protein coding genes.
Edmund Beecher Wilson
Edmund Beecher Wilson (19 October 1856 – 3 March 1939) was a pioneering American zoologist and geneticist. He wrote one of the most famous textbooks in the history of modern biology, "The Cell". He and Nettie Maria Stevens were the first researchers to describe the chromosomal basis of sex, but they conducted their research independently of each other.
Uniparental inheritance
Like all other genetic concepts, the discovery of uniparental inheritance stems from the days of an Augustinian priest known as Gregor Johann Mendel. The soon-to-be "father of modern genetics" spent his days conducting hybridization experiments on pea plants("Pisum sativum") in his monastery's garden. During a period of seven years (1856 to 1863), Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants which led to him deducing the two famous generalizations known as Mendel's Laws of Heredity. The first, the law of segregation, states that "when any individual produces gametes, the copies of a gene separate, so that each gamete receives only one copy". The second, the law of independent assortment, states that "alleles of different genes assort independently of one another during gamete formation". Although his work was published, it lay dormant until it was rediscovered in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns but it was not until 1909 that non-mendelian inheritance was even suggested. Carl Erich Correns and Erwin Baur, in separately conducted researches on "Pelargonium" and "Mirabilis" plants, observed a green-white variation (later found as the result of mutations in the chloroplast genome) that did not follow the Mendelian laws of inheritance. Nearly twenty years later, non-mendelian inheritance of a mitochondrial mutation was also observed and, in the sixties, it was proven that chloroplasts and mitochondria have their own DNA and that they are capable translation, transcription, and replication independent of the nucleus. Soon after, the discoveries of uniparental and doubly uniparental inheritance came.
History of biology
In the early 20th century, the rediscovery of Mendel's work led to the rapid development of genetics by Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students, and by the 1930s the combination of population genetics and natural selection in the "neo-Darwinian synthesis". New disciplines developed rapidly, especially after Watson and Crick proposed the structure of DNA. Following the establishment of the Central Dogma and the cracking of the genetic code, biology was largely split between "organismal biology"—the fields that deal with whole organisms and groups of organisms—and the fields related to "cellular and molecular biology". By the late 20th century, new fields like genomics and proteomics were reversing this trend, with organismal biologists using molecular techniques, and molecular and cell biologists investigating the interplay between genes and the environment, as well as the genetics of natural populations of organisms.
Computational genomics
The emergence of the phrase "computational genomics" coincides with the availability of complete sequenced genomes in the mid-to-late 1990s. The first meeting of the Annual Conference on Computational Genomics was organized by scientists from The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in 1998, providing a forum for this speciality and effectively distinguishing this area of science from the more general fields of Genomics or Computational Biology. The first use of this term in scientific literature, according to MEDLINE abstracts, was just one year earlier in Nucleic Acids Research. The final Computational Genomics conference was held in 2006, featuring a keynote talk by Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall, co-discoverer of the link between Helicobacter pylori and stomach ulcers. As of 2014, the leading conferences in the field include Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB).
Ewan Birney
Birney is one of the founders of the Ensembl genome browser and other databases, and has played a key role in many large-scale genomics projects, notably the sequencing of the Human Genome in 2000 and the analysis of genome function in the ENCODE project. He has played a role in annotating the genome sequences of the human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms. His research group focuses on genomic algorithms and inter-individual differences in human and other animal species.
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Thomas Hunt Morgan (September 25, 1866 – December 4, 1945) was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity.
Genetics
With the newfound molecular understanding of inheritance came an explosion of research. A notable theory arose from Tomoko Ohta in 1973 with her amendment to the neutral theory of molecular evolution through publishing the nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution. In this theory, Ohta stressed the importance of natural selection and the environment to the rate at which genetic evolution occurs. One important development was chain-termination DNA sequencing in 1977 by Frederick Sanger. This technology allows scientists to read the nucleotide sequence of a DNA molecule. In 1983, Kary Banks Mullis developed the polymerase chain reaction, providing a quick way to isolate and amplify a specific section of DNA from a mixture. The efforts of the Human Genome Project, Department of Energy, NIH, and parallel private efforts by Celera Genomics led to the sequencing of the human genome in 2003.
Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal
The medal is named after Thomas Hunt Morgan, the 1933 Nobel Prize winner, who received this award for his work with Drosophila and his "discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity." Morgan recognized that Drosophila, which could be bred quickly and inexpensively, had large quantities of offspring and a short life cycle, would make an excellent organism for genetic studies. His studies of the white-eye mutation and discovery of sex-linked inheritance provided the first experimental evidence that chromosomes are the carriers of genetic information. Subsequent studies in his laboratory led to the discovery of recombination and the first genetic maps.
Genome (book)
Lee M. Silver, reviewing "Genome" in "The New York Times", argues that the book's theme is that each individual's genome contains "echoes" (Ridley's word) of their ancestors' lives. Silver calls Ridley "adamant" in believing that the use of "personal genetics" must not be left for doctors or governments to control, following on from the mistakes of eugenics a century ago, but that it's a fundamental human right to "see and use the messages in their own DNA as they see fit." Silver describes the book as remarkable for focusing on "pure intellectual discovery", providing "delightful stories". He suggests that even practising geneticists will gain a sense of wonder from the "hidden secrets" in the book.
Bioinformatics
Pan genomics is a concept introduced in 2005 by Tettelin and Medini which eventually took root in bioinformatics. Pan genome is the complete gene repertoire of a particular taxonomic group: although initially applied to closely related strains of a species, it can be applied to a larger context like genus, phylum etc. It is divided in two parts- The Core genome: Set of genes common to all the genomes under study (These are often housekeeping genes vital for survival) and The Dispensable/Flexible Genome: Set of genes not present in all but one or some genomes under study. A bioinformatics tool BPGA can be used to characterize the Pan Genome of bacterial species.
Jon Beckwith
Beckwith led the research group that in 1969 isolated the first gene from a bacterial chromosome. Some of researchers worked in the Beckwith laboratory at the Harvard Medical School and consisted of several now well-known scientists and doctors including James A. Shapiro and Lawrence Eron, MD.; others ( Lorne MacHattie and Garret Ihler ) were located in the laboratory of Charles Thomas. The procedure used was devised by Garret Ihler and Karin Ippen. Complementary strands of the gene, carried within non-complementary strands of viral DNA, from viruses transducing the gene in reverse orientations which had been separated by a poly U,G density-gradient technique, were annealed to form double-stranded DNA. The single-stranded DNA was then removed using a single-strand specific DNase under investigation in the Thomas laboratory, leaving the double-stranded gene intact. The elegant electron micrographs of the pre- and post-digested DNA were taken by MacHatty in the Thomas laboratory. Before and following this experiment, Beckwith made important contributions to the study of bacterial genetics. His studies include the mechanisms of protein secretion, disulfide bond formation, and cell division. In addition, he is a prominent speaker on the social implications of science and has been an activist in science. He spoke out against the testing of boys for XYY chromosomes and was a member of the ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications) committee of the Human Genome Project initiated by James D. Watson. He has worked on issues of social responsibility in science and since 1983 has taught a course on the Social Issues in Biology at Harvard University, one of the first of its kind. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986.
Roy John Britten
Roy John Britten (1 October 1919 – 21 January 2012) was an American molecular biologist known for his discovery of repeated DNA sequences in the genomes of eukaryotic organisms, and later on the evolution of the genome.
Genome
New sequencing technologies, such as massive parallel sequencing have also opened up the prospect of personal genome sequencing as a diagnostic tool, as pioneered by Manteia Predictive Medicine. A major step toward that goal was the completion in 2007 of the full genome of James D. Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA.
Genome
Whereas a genome sequence lists the order of every DNA base in a genome, a genome map identifies the landmarks. A genome map is less detailed than a genome sequence and aids in navigating around the genome. The Human Genome Project was organized to map and to sequence the human genome. A fundamental step in the project was the release of a detailed genomic map by Jean Weissenbach and his team at the Genoscope in Paris.
Sex-limited genes
Unsurprisingly, the idea of sex-limited genes was initially developed by Charles Darwin himself in 1871 in his book "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex." He does not distinguish between sex-limited, sex-linked, and sex-influenced genes, but refers to any gene that expresses differently between sexes as sex-limited. While this concept was still in its infancy, Darwin catalyzed the further development of sex-related selection. Thomas Hunt Morgan, fully aware of this confusing terminology, published an article in "The American Naturalist "in 1914 titled "Sex-Linked and Sex-Limited Inheritance." This article directly acknowledges that Darwin applied the term sex-limited whenever a characteristic seemed specific to one sex. Morgan proposes the definitions for sex-linked genes and sex-limited genes that we still use today (and that were defined in the introduction above). This paper helped to distinguish between these two similar concepts and clarify much confusion in the scientific community at the time. Morgan's paper was followed by several others involving sex-limited genes and their expression as traits. One of the more notable examples is John H. Gerould's "Inheritance of White Wing Color, a Sex-Limited (Sex-Controlled) Variation in Yellow Pierid Butterflies," published in "Genetics "in 1923 (and edited slightly in 1924). Gerould observed that in this species of butterfly, females naturally occur as yellow or white, while males only occur with yellow coloration. He extensively explores this apparently sex-limited trait from a genetic perspective in this ground-breaking 50 page paper. To conclude the notable advancements in the early stages of the development of sex-limited genes, a brief discussion of R. A. Fisher is necessary. Commonly hailed as one of the best evolutionary biologists of his time, Fisher was also a talented geneticist. His book "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection", published in 1930, over 20 years before the double-helix shape of DNA was discovered, was the first attempt to explain Darwin's theories within the foundation of genetics. Chapter 6 of this book is titled "Sexual Reproduction and Sexual Selection" and includes a genetic interpretation of Darwin's initial idea of sex-limited genes. After these groundbreaking works, papers continue to be published further exploring the causes, mechanisms, evolutionary advantages, and more of sex-limited genes.
Human Genome Project
Due to widespread international cooperation and advances in the field of genomics (especially in sequence analysis), as well as major advances in computing technology, a 'rough draft' of the genome was finished in 2000 (announced jointly by U.S. President Bill Clinton and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair on June 26, 2000). This first available rough draft assembly of the genome was completed by the Genome Bioinformatics Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, primarily led by then graduate student Jim Kent. Ongoing sequencing led to the announcement of the essentially complete genome on April 14, 2003, two years earlier than planned. In May 2006, another milestone was passed on the way to completion of the project, when the sequence of the last chromosome was published in "Nature".
C-value
The term "C-value enigma" represents an update of the more common but outdated term "C-value paradox" (Thomas 1971), being ultimately derived from the term "C-value" (Swift 1950) in reference to haploid nuclear DNA contents. The term was coined by Canadian biologist Dr. T. Ryan Gregory of the University of Guelph in 2000/2001. In general terms, the C-value enigma relates to the issue of variation in the amount of non-coding DNA found within the genomes of different eukaryotes.
Jesús Mosterín
The 21st century has witnessed a vigorous revival of the idea of human nature in the hands of authors like Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker and Jesús Mosterín. The successful sequencing of the human genome and the ongoing research on the function of genes and of regulatory sequences, together with the insights on the workings of the brain, have brought a new actuality and significance to this classical notion. According to Mosterín, the nature of our species "Homo sapiens" is the information genetically transmitted and present in the human genome (in the genetic pool). Your individual nature lies in your own genome, present in the chromosomes of your cells. The human genome has a layered structure and (up to a point) recapitulates the history of our human lineage. The oldest and deepest strata of our nature represent the living functions common to all life on Earth. Subsequent strata reflect later novelties. The newest layers are devoted to the most recent acquisitions, like bipedalism, grip of precision, large brain cortex, language and other abstract or recursive cognitive processes. Mosterín has dealt with the methods and criteria for distinguishing natural from cultural aspects of human capacities and behaviors and has provided a solid basis to theoretical anthropology. He has also engaged in the discussion and clarification of bioethical issues, like research with embryonic stem cells, birth control, abortion and euthanasia, taking always a scientific point of view and a position in favor of human freedom.
Phenome
The term was first used by Davis in 1949, "We here propose the name "phenome" for the sum total of extragenic, non-autoreproductive portions of the cell, whether cytoplasmic or nuclear. The phenome would be the material basis of the phenotype, just as the genome is the material basis of the genotype."
Wilhelm Johannsen
Wilhelm Johannsen (3 February 1857 – 11 November 1927) was a Danish botanist, plant physiologist, and geneticist. He is best known for coining the terms gene, phenotype and genotype, and for his 1903 "pure line" experiments in genetics.
Genome (novel)
Genome (, Genom) is a science fiction/detective novel by the popular Russian sci-fi writer Sergei Lukyanenko. The novel began a series also called "Genome", consisting of "Dances on the Snow" (a prequel, although written later) and "Cripples" (a sequel). The novel explores the problems of the widespread use of human genetic engineering, which alters not only human physiology but also psychology.
Genomic library
The first DNA-based genome ever fully sequenced was achieved by two-time Nobel Prize winner, Frederick Sanger, in 1977. Sanger and his team of scientists created a library of the bacteriophage, phi X 174, for use in DNA sequencing. The importance of this success contributed to the ever-increasing demand for sequencing genomes to research gene therapy. Teams are now able to catalog polymorphisms in genomes and investigate those candidate genes contributing to maladies such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and Type 1 diabetes. These are due to the advance of genome-wide association studies from the ability to create and sequence genomic libraries. Prior, linkage and candidate-gene studies were some of the only approaches.
Walter Gilbert
Gilbert was an early proponent of sequencing the human genome. At a March 1986 meeting in Santa Fe New Mexico he proclaimed "The total human sequence is the grail of human genetics". In 1987, he proposed starting a company called Genome Corporation to sequence the genome and sell access to the information. In an opinion piece in Nature in 1991, he envisioned completion of the human genome sequence transforming biology into a field in which computer databases would be as essential as laboratory reagents
Charles DeLisi
Charles DeLisi (December 9, 1941) is an American biomedical scientist and the Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering at Boston University. He has made pioneering contributions to mathematical and computational immunology, cell biophysics, genomics, and protein and nucleic acid structure and function. Dr. DeLisi has been called the father of the Human Genome Project and is widely regarded as a transformative academic leader.
Dominance (genetics)
The concept of dominance was introduced by Gregor Johann Mendel. Though Mendel, "The Father of Genetics", first used the term in the 1860s, it was not widely known until the early twentieth century. Mendel observed that, for a variety of traits of garden peas having to do with the appearance of seeds, seed pods, and plants, there were two discrete phenotypes, such as round versus wrinkled seeds, yellow versus green seeds, red versus white flowers or tall versus short plants. When bred separately, the plants always produced the same phenotypes, generation after generation. However, when lines with different phenotypes were crossed (interbred), one and only one of the parental phenotypes showed up in the offspring (green, or round, or red, or tall). However, when these hybrid plants were crossed, the offspring plants showed the two original phenotypes, in a characteristic 3:1 ratio, the more common phenotype being that of the parental hybrid plants. Mendel reasoned that each parent in the first cross was a homozygote for different alleles (one parent AA and the other parent aa), that each contributed one allele to the offspring, with the result that all of these hybrids were heterozygotes (Aa), and that one of the two alleles in the hybrid cross dominated expression of the other: A masked a. The final cross between two heterozygotes (Aa X Aa) would produce AA, Aa, and aa offspring in a 1:2:1 genotype ratio with the first two classes showing the (A) phenotype, and the last showing the (a) phenotype, thereby producing the 3:1 phenotype ratio.
History of botany
Following the establishment of Mendel's laws, the gene-chromosome theory of heredity was confirmed by the work of August Weismann who identified chromosomes as the hereditary material. Also, in observing the halving of the chromosome number in germ cells he anticipated work to follow on the details of meiosis, the complex process of redistribution of hereditary material that occurs in the germ cells. In the 1920s and 1930s population genetics combined the theory of evolution with Mendelian genetics to produce the modern synthesis. By the mid-1960s the molecular basis of metabolism and reproduction was firmly established through the new discipline of molecular biology. Genetic engineering, the insertion of genes into a host cell for cloning, began in the 1970s with the invention of recombinant DNA techniques and its commercial applications applied to agricultural crops followed in the 1990s. There was now the potential to identify organisms by molecular "fingerprinting" and to estimate the times in the past when critical evolutionary changes had occurred through the use of "molecular clocks".
Genome
The development of new technologies has made genome sequencing dramatically cheaper and easier, and the number of complete genome sequences is growing rapidly. The US National Institutes of Health maintains one of several comprehensive databases of genomic information. Among the thousands of completed genome sequencing projects include those for rice, a mouse, the plant "Arabidopsis thaliana", the puffer fish, and the bacteria E. coli. In December 2013, scientists first sequenced the entire "genome" of a Neanderthal, an extinct species of humans. The genome was extracted from the toe bone of a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal found in a Siberian cave.
Genome (disambiguation)
Genome may also refer to:
Biology
The discovery of the physical representation of heredity came along with evolutionary principles and population genetics. In the 1940s and early 1950s, experiments pointed to DNA as the component of chromosomes that held the trait-carrying units that had become known as genes. A focus on new kinds of model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics. From the 1950s to present times, biology has been vastly extended in the molecular domain. The genetic code was cracked by Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg after DNA was understood to contain codons. Finally, the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 with the goal of mapping the general human genome. This project was essentially completed in 2003, with further analysis still being published. The Human Genome Project was the first step in a globalized effort to incorporate accumulated knowledge of biology into a functional, molecular definition of the human body and the bodies of other organisms.
Genome
The term "genome" was created in 1920 by Hans Winkler, professor of botany at the University of Hamburg, Germany. The Oxford Dictionary suggests the name is a blend of the words "gene" and "chromosome". However, see omics for a more thorough discussion. A few related "-ome" words already existed, such as "biome" and "rhizome", forming a vocabulary into which "genome" fits systematically.
Hermann Kolbe
Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe (27 September 1818 – 25 November 1884) was a seminal contributor in the birth of modern organic chemistry. He was a Professor at Marburg and Leipzig. Kolbe coined the term synthesis and contributed to the philosophical demise of vitalism through synthesis of the organic substance acetic acid from carbon disulfide, and also contributed to the development of structural theory. This was done via modifications to the idea of "radicals" and accurate prediction of the existence of secondary and tertiary alcohols, and to the emerging array of organic reactions through his Kolbe electrolysis of carboxylate salts, the Kolbe-Schmitt reaction in the preparation of aspirin and the Kolbe nitrile synthesis. After studies with Wöhler and Bunsen, Kolbe was involved with the early internationalization of chemistry through overseas work in London (with Frankland), and rose through the ranks of his field to edit the . As such, he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences won the Royal Society of London's Davy Medal in the year of his death. Despite these accomplishments and his training a storied next generation of chemists (including Zaitsev, Curtius, Beckmann, Graebe, Markovnikov, etc.), Kolbe is remembered for editing the "Journal" for more than a decade, where his rejection of Kekulé's structure of benzene, van't Hoff's theory on the origin of chirality and von Baeyer's reforms of nomenclature were personally critical and linguistically violent. Kolbe died of a heart attack in Leipzig at age 68, six years after the death of his wife, Charlotte. He was survived by four children.
ENI award
The Research and Environment prize was awarded to the American scientist J. Craig Venter, one of the most important living geneticists who, in 2000, announced that he was the first to have complete a map of the human genome. The prize was awarded for late 2007 research paper, published in the journal "Science", in which he created a synthetic chromosome in the laboratory while working on the DNA of bacteria. Venter's results are a fundamental step towards synthetic genes, which promise an unlimited range of revolutionary applications in the energy and environmental fields, such as new processes for the sequestration of CO or the regeneration of polluted environments. In terms of energy, this research opens the road to the design of new metabolic paths for the production of innovative biofuels from organic materials.
Race (human categorization)
Craig Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000. Upon examining the data from the genome mapping, Venter realized that although the genetic variation within the human species is on the order of 1–3% (instead of the previously assumed 1%), the types of variations do not support notion of genetically defined races. Venter said, "Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines (that would stand out), if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet." "When we try to apply science to try to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart."
Genomics
In addition to his seminal work on the amino acid sequence of insulin, Frederick Sanger and his colleagues played a key role in the development of DNA sequencing techniques that enabled the establishment of comprehensive genome sequencing projects. In 1975, he and Alan Coulson published a sequencing procedure using DNA polymerase with radiolabelled nucleotides that he called the "Plus and Minus technique". This involved two closely related methods that generated short oligonucleotides with defined 3' termini. These could be fractionated by electrophoresis on a polyacrylamide gel (called polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis) and visualised using autoradiography. The procedure could sequence up to 80 nucleotides in one go and was a big improvement, but was still very laborious. Nevertheless, in 1977 his group was able to sequence most of the 5,386 nucleotides of the single-stranded bacteriophage φX174, completing the first fully sequenced DNA-based genome. The refinement of the "Plus and Minus" method resulted in the chain-termination, or Sanger method (see below), which formed the basis of the techniques of DNA sequencing, genome mapping, data storage, and bioinformatic analysis most widely used in the following quarter-century of research. In the same year Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam of Harvard University independently developed the Maxam-Gilbert method (also known as the "chemical method") of DNA sequencing, involving the preferential cleavage of DNA at known bases, a less efficient method. For their groundbreaking work in the sequencing of nucleic acids, Gilbert and Sanger shared half the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Paul Berg (recombinant DNA).
Materials Genome
The name Materials Genome was coined in December 2002 by Dr. Zi-Kui Liu who incorporated the company "MaterialsGenome, Inc." in Pennsylvania, USA, and filed the trademark protection on March 5, 2004 (78512752). The Certificate of Registration (Reg. No. 4,224,035) was issued by the Patent and Trademark office on October 16, 2012.
Designer baby
Scientists have been able to better understand the genetic traits of humans through projects such as The Human Genome Project. This project was launched around 1990 and was an international research project that had an end goal of mapping and understanding every gene in the human body. As a part of the Human Genome Project, we have been able to pin point specific locations for about 12,800 specific genes within different chromosomes.
Genome (book)
The book devotes one chapter to each pair of human chromosomes. Since one (unnumbered) chapter is required to discuss the sex chromosomes, the final chapter is number 22. Ridley was inspired to adopt this model by Primo Levi's book "The Periodic Table".The first chapter begins with a quote from Alexander Pope on the cycle of life. The very broad topic "Life" is also the topic of the chapter. Ridley discusses the history of the gene briefly, including our "last universal common ancestor".Ridley discusses the history of human kind as a genetically distinct species. He compares the human genome to chimpanzees, and ancestral primates. He also points out that until the 19th Century, most scholars believed that there were 24 sets of genes, not 23 as known today.This chapter discusses the interplay between early geneticists, including Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Hermann Joseph Muller and Francis Crick.Huntington's Corea is used to discuss the use of a particular sequence on Chromosome Four to cause traumatic health consequences. The search for the chromosomal source of this and other related diseases is discussed through the work of Nancy Wexler, someone who may have inherited the gene but who turns to scientific work to study it in others.The concepts of pleiotropy and genetic pluralism are introduced. A brief history of the study of asthma is used as the case study. Asthma is related to as many as fifteen different genes, many on chromosome five. Specifically, this includes a change from adenosine (A) to guanine (G) at position 46 on the ADRB2 gene. The ADRB2 gene is related to the control of bronchodilation and bronchoconstriction.Robert Plomin's announcement in 1997 of the discovery of "a gene for intelligence" on chromosome 6 is the foundation for this chapter's lengthier discussion of the genetic basis for intelligence. This included gene IGFR on the long arm of chromosome 6, which may also be related to liver cancer. Ridley continues his premise in this chapter that the use of simple genetic markers is inadequate to describe the complete function of the genome, or the causation of disease.This chapter discusses whether the form and existence of language has a genetic component. In particular, "specific language impairment" is possibly related to a gene on chromosome 7. Ridley discusses the scientific disagreement between Canadian linguist Myrna Gopnik and others on whether this disorder relates to difficulties with grammar formulation, or is a broader intellectual disorder.
William Bateson
Bateson co-discovered genetic linkage with Reginald Punnett and Edith Saunders, and he and Punnett founded the "Journal of Genetics" in 1910. Bateson also coined the term "epistasis" to describe the genetic interaction of two independent loci.
Herbert John Webber
Webber coined the word "clone" in 1903 and was the first to use it to describe a colony of organisms derived asexually from a single progenitor.
History of molecular biology
Friedrich Miescher (1844–1895) discovered a substance he called "nuclein" in 1869. Somewhat later, he isolated a pure sample of the material now known as DNA from the sperm of salmon, and in 1889 his pupil, Richard Altmann, named it "nucleic acid". This substance was found to exist only in the chromosomes.
Major gene
The term major gene into the science of inheritance was introduced by Keneth Mather (1941).
Imre Festetics
Many of the central principles the discipline of genetics were formulated by Imre Festetics through the study of sheep. Festetics formulated a number of rules of heredity and was the first to refer to these as "genetic laws of nature" ("Die genetischen Gesatze der Natur"). In so doing he used the term "genetic" for the first time, 80 years before William Bateson did so in his personal letter to Alan Sedgwick. Festetics created this new term to clearly distinguish his rules of heredity, or "genetic laws,"
from the "physiological laws" of Ehrenfels.In these ‘‘Genetic Laws,’’ Festetics was the first to recognize empirically the segregation of characters in the second
hybrid generation. He also linked heredity ("vererbung") with health and vigor
independently of external factors, stressing the role of inbreeding (combined with strong selection) in stabilizing character inheritance for preserving or developing new races. To illustrate the concept he used sheep and horse breeds as examples, although he also applied it to the human species by considering populations of isolated Hungarian villages, in which he had observed degenerative mental and physical characteristics. Festetics’s observations highlighted important correlations between variability, adaptation, and development. He also noted the consequences of selection and its role in heredity, believing that variability and his postulated laws of genetics were connected, acting together in breeding as well as in the natural processes controlling populations of different animals,including humans.
Genome (journal)
Genome, formerly known as the Canadian Journal of Genetics and Cytology (1959–1986), is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal that published since 1959 by NRC Research Press. "Genome" prints articles in the fields of genetics and genomics, including cytogenetics, molecular and evolutionary genetics, population genetics, and developmental genetics. "Genome" is affiliated with the Canadian Society for Molecular Biosciences, and is co-edited by Graham Scoles of the University of Saskatchewan and Melania E. Cristescu of McGill University.
Wilhelm Kühne
Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne (28 March 1837 – 10 June 1900) was a German physiologist. Born in Hamburg, he is best known today for coining the word enzyme.
Hamilton O. Smith
He later became a leading figure in the nascent field of genomics, when in 1995 he and a team at The Institute for Genomic Research sequenced the first bacterial genome, that of "Haemophilus influenzae". "H. influenza" was the same organism in which Smith had discovered restriction enzymes in the late 1960s. He subsequently played a key role in the sequencing of many of the early genomes at The Institute for Genomic Research, and in the assembly of the human genome at Celera Genomics, which he joined when it was founded in 1998.
Auguste Forel
Forel realized from experiments that neurons were the basic elements of the nervous system. He found that the neuromuscular junction communicated by mere contact and did not require the anastomosis of fibres. This came to be called the "Contact Theory of Forel". The word "neuron" was coined by Wilhelm von Waldeyer who published a review of the work of Forel and others in 1891. Waldeyer synthesized ideas without actually conducting any research himself and published it in "Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift" a widely read journal which made him popular. Forel was very bitter about Waldeyer's achievement of fame that it is thought to have contributed to the decline in his interest in neuroanatomy and neurology. Less controversially, Forel first described in 1877 the zona incerta area in the brain. He gave it this name as it a "region of which nothing certain can be said".
Bernie May (geneticist)
As a graduate student and early career investigator, Dr. May pioneered the application of allozyme electrophoresis to measure genetic variability in aquatic organisms. His Master's thesis included a manual for allozyme electrophoresis, has been widely referenced, and subsequently appeared as a book chapter. He contributed key papers that played an integral role in forming our current understanding of the structure and evolution of salmonid genomes. He was an important player in the early mapping of the salmonid genome and coined the term “residual tetrasomy". During his early career Dr. May also discovered the presence of and coined the name for the quagga mussel. He designed one of the earliest graphical user interface population genetic software programs, Genes in Populations.
Genetic engineering
Humans have altered the genomes of species for thousands of years through selective breeding, or artificial selection as contrasted with natural selection. More recently, mutation breeding has used exposure to chemicals or radiation to produce a high frequency of random mutations, for selective breeding purposes. Genetic engineering as the direct manipulation of DNA by humans outside breeding and mutations has only existed since the 1970s. The term "genetic engineering" was first coined by Jack Williamson in his science fiction novel "Dragon's Island", published in 1951 – one year before DNA's role in heredity was confirmed by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase, and two years before James Watson and Francis Crick showed that the DNA molecule has a double-helix structure – though the general concept of direct genetic manipulation was explored in rudimentary form in Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1936 science fiction story "Proteus Island".
Richard K. Wilson
Dr. Wilson’s laboratories have been among the world’s leaders in genome analysis. His teams have sequenced and analyzed billions of bases of DNA from the genomes of bacteria, yeast, plants, invertebrates, vertebrates, primates and humans. Dr. Wilson and his colleagues at Washington University sequenced the first animal genome – that of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans – and contributed substantially to the sequencing and analysis of the human genome. Following the Human Genome Project, they also sequenced the genomes of the mouse, chimpanzee, orangutan, gorilla, rhesus macaque, platypus, the plants Arabidopsis thaliana and Zea mays (corn), as well as various invertebrates, insect vectors and microorganisms. His team was the first to sequence the genome of a cancer patient and discover genetic signatures relevant to the pathogenesis of the disease. Building upon these achievements, Dr. Wilson and his colleagues helped initiate and participated in several landmark genomics projects including The Cancer Genome Atlas, the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, the Genome Reference Consortium, the Human Microbiome Project, and the Centers for Common Disease Genomics.
Gene
The genome is the total genetic material of an organism and includes both the genes and non-coding sequences.
Genome (book)
Ridley contemplates evolutionary psychology using the genes SRY on the Y chromosome, and DAX1 and Xq28 on the X chromosome. The theory of genetic conflict and evolution is debated using the rhetorical question, are we bodies containing genes, or genes in bodies?Richard Dawkins's concept of the "selfish gene" is described by Ridley through a discussion of retrotransposons. This includes the behavior of the LINE-1 and Alu transposons. Further, Ridley discusses the possible purposes of cytosine methylation in development. The chapter also discusses how, through reverse transcriptase, retroviruses like HIV copy themselves to the human genome.For chromosome 9, the book examines the discussion of the blood-typing genetic sequences. Namely, the ABO blood groups and their impact on evolution are discussed. Other genes mentioned include CFTR for cystic fibrosis. Ridley concludes that the Human Genome Project is largely based on the inaccurate belief that there is one single human genome. Proof that this is wrong comes from answering the question, which of the several choices of blood typing genetic sequence is selected, since each one has different disease-resistant and evolutionary consequences?The impact of stress on the human body is described starting with the creation of hormones by the CYP17 gene on chromosome 10. Ridley points out the relationship between cholesterol, steroidal hormones such as progesterone, cortisol, aldosterone, testosterone and oestradiol.Ridley chooses the gene D4DR which codes for the manufacture of dopamine and is located on the short arm of chromosome 11. Interactions between dopamine, serotonin and other serotonin neurochemistry are lightly covered.This chapter relates to how understanding the genetic code matches models for embryonic development among vertebrates. Ridley discusses 'gap' genes, 'pair-rule' genes, and 'segment-polarity' genes. Homeotic genes and Hox genes are described briefly. Walter Gehring's discovery of the homeobox set of codes in 1983 is related to an on and off switch metaphorically.Ridley describes the relationship between the development of Indo-European and other ancient root languages and the classical polymorphisms which map genetic frequencies in Eurasia. The interplay between the breast cancer genes BRCA2 on chromosome 13 and BRCA1 on chromosome 17 help to illustrate these larger concepts. Ridley also describes genetic studies of different types of peoples to isolate why people developed a mutation allowing adults to digest lactase in adulthood. He concludes that since the herding tribes of the world all evolved this mutation earliest, these people's genes adapted to their environment. This may sound like Lamarck's tale of the blacksmith's strong arms 'handed down' to his sons, but it is not. The controversial conclusion is that willed action can alter our evolutionary history and genetic composition, by changing the environment to which we have to adapt.This chapter examines the so-called "immortality" of the genetic code - i.e. how is it that genetic code can remain as precise as it has been for 50 billion copyings since the dawn of life? Part of the answer is in the protein enzyme telomerase, lying on chromosome 14 and coded by the gene TEP1.Ridley discusses two chromosome 15 genetic diseases, Prader-Willi syndrome and Angelman's syndrome: Prader-Willi inherited from the father, Angelman's from the mother, through sexual antagonism and the placenta's control by paternal genes.Ridley debates the old knowledge versus instinct problem, claiming that natural selection will be the explanation of the instinct for grammar, and noting that many animals including invertebrates can learn. All the same, he argues that the brain is controlled by genes and gene products.The TP53 gene on chromosome 17 suppresses cancer cells, while oncogenes stimulate cell growth and can cause cancer if kept switched on, while TP53 can cause cancer when kept switched off. Other mutator genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 contribute to breast cancer.
Genome evolution
Genome evolution is the process by which a genome changes in structure (sequence) or size over time. The study of genome evolution involves multiple fields such as structural analysis of the genome, the study of genomic parasites, gene and ancient genome duplications, polyploidy, and comparative genomics. Genome evolution is a constantly changing and evolving field due to the steadily growing number of sequenced genomes, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic, available to the scientific community and the public at large.
Since the first sequenced genomes became available in the late 1970s, scientists have been using comparative genomics to study the differences and similarities between various genomes. Genome sequencing has progressed over time to include more and more complex genomes including the eventual sequencing of the entire human genome in 2001. By comparing genomes of both close relatives and distant ancestors the stark differences and similarities between species began to emerge as well as the mechanisms by which genomes are able to evolve over time.
Richard Dawkins
Although Dawkins invented the term "meme", he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel, and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. For instance, John Laurent has suggested that the term may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon. Semon regarded "mneme" as the collective set of neural memory traces (conscious or subconscious) that were inherited, although such view would be considered as Lamarckian by modern biologists. Laurent also found the use of the term "mneme" in Maurice Maeterlinck's "The Life of the White Ant" (1926), and Maeterlinck himself stated that he obtained the phrase from Semon's work. In his own work, Maeterlinck tried to explain memory in termites and ants by claiming that neural memory traces were added "upon the individual mneme". Nonetheless, James Gleick describes Dawkins's concept of the meme as "his most famous memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytising against religiosity".
Craig Venter
In 2000, Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Public Genome Project jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome, a full three years ahead of the expected end of the Public Genome Program. The announcement was made along with U.S. President Bill Clinton, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network.
On 15 February 2001, the Human Genome Project consortium published the first Human Genome in the journal Nature, and was followed, one day later, by a Celera publication in Science. Despite some claims that shotgun sequencing was in some ways less accurate than the clone-by-clone method chosen by the Human Genome Project, the technique became widely accepted by the scientific community.
Complete linkage
The idea of genetic linkage was first discovered by the British geneticists William Bateson, Edith Rebecca Saunders and Reginald Punnett. Thomas Hunt Morgan expanded the idea of linkage after noticing that in some instances the observed rate of crossing-over events differed from the expected rate of crossing-over events. He attributed the depressed rates of recombination to the smaller spatial separation of genes on a chromosome; Hypothesizing that genes which are more closely positioned on a chromosome will have smaller rates of recombination than those that are spaced farther apart. The unit of measurement describing the distance between two linked genes is the Centimorgan, and is named after Thomas Hunt Morgan. A centimorgan is equivalent to the percent of recombination. two loci with 2% recombination frequency are located 2 centimorgans apart.
Genetics
Prior to Mendel, Imre Festetics, a Hungarian noble, who lived in Kőszeg before Mendel, was the first who used the word "genetics." He described several rules of genetic inheritance in his work "The genetic law of the Nature" (Die genetische Gesätze der Natur, 1819). His second law is the same as what Mendel published. In his third law, he developed the basic principles of mutation (he can be considered a forerunner of Hugo de Vries).
Mycoplasma genitalium
On 6 October 2007, Craig Venter announced that a team of scientists led by Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith at the J. Craig Venter Institute had successfully constructed a synthetic DNA using which they planned to make the first synthetic genome. Reporting in "The Guardian", Venter said that they have stitched together a DNA strand of 381 genes long and contained 580,000 base pairs, based on the genome of "M. genitalium". On 24 January 2008, they announced the successful creation of a synthetic bacterium, which they named "Mycoplasma genitalium" JCVI-1.0 (the name of the strain indicating J. Craig Venter Institute with its specimen number). They synthesised and assembled the complete 582,970-base pair genome of the bacterium. The final stages of synthesis involved cloning the DNA into the bacterium "E. coli" for nucleotide production and sequencing. This produced large fragments of approximately 144,000 base pairs or 1/4th of the whole genome. Finally, the products were cloned inside the yeast "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" to synthesize the 580,000 base pairs. The molecular size of the synthetic bacterial genome is 360,110 kilodaltons (kDa). Printed in 10-point font, the letters of the genome cover 147 pages.
Intron
The fact that genes were split or interrupted by introns was discovered independently in 1977 by Phillip Allen Sharp and Richard J. Roberts, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1993. The term "intron" was introduced by American biochemist Walter Gilbert:
History of science
Perhaps the most prominent, controversial and far-reaching theory in all of science has been the theory of evolution by natural selection put forward by the British naturalist Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin proposed that the features of all living things, including humans, were shaped by natural processes over long periods of time. The theory of evolution in its current form affects almost all areas of biology. Implications of evolution on fields outside of pure science have led to both opposition and support from different parts of society, and profoundly influenced the popular understanding of "man's place in the universe". In the early 20th century, the study of heredity became a major investigation after the rediscovery in 1900 of the laws of inheritance developed by the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel in 1866. Mendel's laws provided the beginnings of the study of genetics, which became a major field of research for both scientific and industrial research. By 1953, James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins clarified the basic structure of DNA, the genetic material for expressing life in all its forms. In the late 20th century, the possibilities of genetic engineering became practical for the first time, and a massive international effort began in 1990 to map out an entire human genome (the Human Genome Project).
Norman Davidson (biologist)
Norman Ralph Davidson (April 5, 1916 – February 14, 2002) was an American molecular biologist notable for advancing genome research, member of the National Academy of Sciences, received a National Medal of Science from U.S. President Bill Clinton, was a professor at Caltech. The "New York Times" called Davidson "major figure in advancing genome research ... whose groundbreaking work in molecular biology led to the earliest understanding of the overall structure of genomes".
The "Los Angeles Times" called him "a groundbreaking Caltech chemical biologist".
President Bill Clinton cited the scientist for "breakthroughs in chemistry and biology which have led to the earliest understanding of the overall structure of genomes".
J. B. S. Haldane
Haldane was the first to have thought of the genetic basis for the cloning of humans, and eventually super-talented individuals. For this he coined the term "clone", though the synonym "clon" (from the Greek word "klon" meaning "twig") had been used in horticulture since the 19th century. He introduced the term in his speech on "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years" at the "Ciba Foundation Symposium on Man and his Future" in 1963.
Human Genome Project
In 2007, a team led by Jonathan Rothberg published James Watson's entire genome, unveiling the six-billion-nucleotide genome of a single individual for the first time.
Hologenome theory of evolution
In September 1994, Richard Jefferson first introduced the term hologenome at a presentation at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the CSH Symposium and earlier, the unsettling number and diversity of microbes that were being discovered through the powerful tool of PCR-amplification of 16S ribosomal RNA genes was exciting, but confusing interpretations in diverse studies. A number of speakers referred to microbial contributions to mammalian or plant DNA samples as 'contamination'. In his lecture, Jefferson argued that these were likely not contamination, but rather essential components of the samples that reflected the actual genetic composition of the organism being studied, and that the logic of the organism's performance and capabilities would be embedded only in the hologenome. Observations on the ubiquity of microbes in plant and soil samples as well as laboratory work on molecular genetics of vertebrate-associated microbial enzymes informed this assertion .
$1,000 genome
The “$1,000 genome” catchphrase was first publicly recorded in December 2001 at a scientific retreat to discuss the future of biomedical research following publication of the first draft of the HGP, convened by the National Human Genome Research Institute at Airlie House in Virginia. The phrase neatly highlighted the chasm between the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion over a decade, and the benchmark for routine, affordable personal genome sequencing.
William Bateson
Between 1900 and 1910 Bateson directed a rather informal "school" of genetics at Cambridge. His group consisted mostly of women associated with Newnham College, Cambridge, and included both his wife Beatrice, and her sister Florence Durham. They provided assistance for his research program at a time when Mendelism was not yet recognised as a legitimate field of study. The women, such as Muriel Wheldale (later Onslow), carried out a series of breeding experiments in various plant and animal species between 1902 and 1910. The results both supported and extended Mendel's laws of heredity. Hilda Blanche Killby, who had finished her studies with the Newnham College Mendelians in 1901, aided Bateson replicate Mendel's crosses in peas. She conducted independent breeding experiments in rabbits and bantam fowl, as well. 
Bateson first suggested using the word "genetics" (from the Greek gennō, "γεννώ"; "to give birth") to describe the study of inheritance and the science of variation in a personal letter to Adam Sedgwick (1854–1913, zoologist at Cambridge, not the Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) who had been Darwin's professor), dated 18 April 1905. Bateson first used the term "genetics" publicly at the Third International Conference on Plant Hybridization in London in 1906. Although this was three years before Wilhelm Johannsen used the word "gene" to describe the units of hereditary information, De Vries had introduced the word "pangene" for the same concept already in 1889, and etymologically the word "genetics" has parallels with Darwin's concept of pangenesis. Bateson and Edith Saunders also coined the word "allelomorph" ("other form"), which was later shortened to allele.
Pathophysiology
The first genetics, Mendelian genetics, began at 1900, yet inheritance of Mendelian traits was localized to chromosomes by 1903, thus chromosomal genetics. Biochemistry emerged in the same decade. In the 1940s, most scientists viewed the cell as a "sack of chemicals"—a membrane containing only loose molecules in chaotic motion—and the only especial cell structures as chromosomes, which bacteria lack as such. Chromosomal DNA was presumed too simple, so genes were sought in chromosomal proteins. Yet in 1953, American biologist James Watson, British physicist Francis Crick, and British chemist Rosalind Franklin inferred DNA's molecular structure—a double helix—and conjectured it to spell a code. In the early 1960s, Crick helped crack a genetic code in DNA, thus establishing molecular genetics.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
In his Nobel Prize lecture titled "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System", the 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology Niels K. Jerne used Chomsky's generative grammar model in "Aspects" to explain the human immune system, comparing "the variable region of a given antibody molecule" to "a sentence". "The immense repertoire of the immune system then becomes ... a lexicon of sentences which is capable of responding to any sentence expressed by the multitude of antigens which the immune system may encounter." Jerne called the DNA segments in chromosomes which encode the variable regions of antibody polypeptides a human's inheritable "deep structures", which can account for the innately complex yet miraculously effective fighting capacity of human antibodies against complex antigens. This is comparable to Chomsky's hypothesis that a child is born with innate language universals to acquire a complex human language in a very short time.
Stanley Norman Cohen
Stanley Norman Cohen (born February 17, 1935 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, United States) is an American geneticist and the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine. According to microbiologist Hugh McDevitt, "Cohen's DNA cloning technology has helped biologists in virtually every field". Without it, "the face of biomedicine and biotechnology would look totally different."
Genome
Michael Crichton's 1990 novel "Jurassic Park" and the subsequent film tell the story of a billionaire who creates a theme park of cloned dinosaurs on a remote island, with disastrous outcomes. A geneticist extracts dinosaur DNA from the blood of ancient mosquitoes and fills in the gaps with DNA from modern species to create several species of dinosaurs. A chaos theorist is asked to give his expert opinion on the safety of engineering an ecosystem with the dinosaurs, and he repeatedly warns that the outcomes of the project will be unpredictable and ultimately uncontrollable. These warnings about the perils of using genomic information are a major theme of the book.
Craig Venter
John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biotechnologist, biochemist, geneticist, and businessman. He is known for leading the first draft sequence of the human genome and assembled the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), where he currently serves as CEO. He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc. and Synthetic Genomics. He was listed on "Time" magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine "New Statesman" listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010". He is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board.
Culturgen
Culturgen is a term coined in 1980 by two American scientists, the biomathematician Charles J. Lumsden and the 
sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, to denote a hypothetical 'unit' of culture, in their controversial attempt to analyse cultural evolution by using techniques borrowed from population genetics, and to infer a theory of evolution of the human mind. It effectively means much the same as the older term "cultural trait" used by anthropologists, and offers similar difficulties of identification and definition. The fullest exposition of their theory appeared in their book "Genes, Mind, and Culture: the coevolutionary process" (1981), which received many reviews in the scientific press, many of them highly negative; it was re-issued in 2005 with a review of subsequent developments. The term has declined in popularity, and the older term meme (coined by Richard Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene" (1976)) is now used in its stead almost universally (even by Wilson in his later writings).
Hitoshi Kihara
At that time, it was mandatory for a Japanese academic to work overseas for a number of years in order to gain admission as members of research faculties. While working in Germany, Hitoshi Kihara studied the genetics of "Rumex acetosella" and other Sorrel species, and discovered the sex chromosomes. In 1936, he noticed that in wheat seven chromosomes become a pair that performs the lowest gene function, and thus nemed it genome. The concept of genome extended all over the world and formed the basis for development of biology and genetic engineering.
Genome News Network
The Genome News Network (abbreviated GNN) is an online magazine that publishes news articles and educational resources about genomics and medicine. It was founded in 1999, with Barbara Culliton as the founding editor-in-chief. It was originally published by Celera Genomics. In 2001, the Institute for Genomic Research became the magazine's new publisher. An article published in "the Lancet Oncology" that year stated that the magazine "offers news, original articles, the online reference book, "What’s a genome?", and primers on sequencing and assembling the genome – all well written and illustrated". As of 2010, new issues of the magazine were published biweekly.
Gene
The existence of discrete inheritable units was first suggested by Gregor Mendel (1822–1884). From 1857 to 1864, in Brno (Czech Republic), he studied inheritance patterns in 8000 common edible pea plants, tracking distinct traits from parent to offspring. He described these mathematically as 2 combinations where n is the number of differing characteristics in the original peas. Although he did not use the term "gene", he explained his results in terms of discrete inherited units that give rise to observable physical characteristics. This description prefigured Wilhelm Johannsen's distinction between genotype (the genetic material of an organism) and phenotype (the visible traits of that organism). Mendel was also the first to demonstrate independent assortment, the distinction between dominant and recessive traits, the distinction between a heterozygote and homozygote, and the phenomenon of discontinuous inheritance.