Greetings–
This week brings a virus double-header about strange ways to fight those pesky buggers…
Over at Stat, I wrote about giant viruses, the weirdest viruses of all. For one thing, these viruses are so big, they get infected by their own viruses. This week giant viruses got even weirder, when scientists reported that they may have an immune system of their own to fight their viral enemies. (Image courtesy of American Scientist) Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, March 4, 2016”
The New York Times, March 3, 2016
What could be more alien than a virus? It’s a nanobiological weapon — a microscopic protein shell holding a few genes that hijack a cell’s internal machinery, forcing it to make new viruses. The battles we fight with these alien enemies brings malaise, scars and even death.
Yet as foreign as viruses may seem, the boundary between us and them is turning out to be remarkably blurry. We use DNA from viruses to do things that are essential to our own survival, scientists are finding. Somehow, we have managed to domesticate some of these invaders.
Continue reading “Study Finds Surprising Benefit of Viral DNA: Fighting Other Viruses”
STAT, February 29, 2016
The strangest life forms on Earth just got a lot stranger.
In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans. Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.
But this new virus was enormous, measuring hundreds of times bigger than any previously known virus. What’s more, it was far more complex. Typical viruses may have just a few genes. The new virus had over 900 — more than many species of bacteria.
Continue reading “Inside the secret defense systems of giant viruses”
Greetings–
These days, I’m working on a book about heredity. This week I spent some time digging through the archives a historical society and came across this crazy pedigree from the early 1900s. At the time, the rediscovery of Mendel had set everyone abuzz, and a lot of scientists believed that everything was genetic–even boat building. (Note how some relatives were merely artistic, musical, mechanical, or literary. Heterozygotes, I guess…) Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, February 26, 2016”
The New York Times, February 26, 2016
Marina Stajic worked for nearly three decades as director of the forensic toxicology lab at the medical examiner’s office in New York City. Last week Dr. Stajic, 66, filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming she had been forced into retirement last year in part because of a disagreement with her superiors over the accuracy of certain DNA tests.
There is more at stake here than Dr. Stajic’s retirement. The cutting-edge technique at the center of this legal dispute, called low copy number DNA analysis, has transformed not just police work, but also a range of scientific fields including cancer biology, in vitro fertilization, archaeology and evolutionary biology. Yet some of the technique’s applications have triggered scientific controversy.
Continue reading “DNA Under the Scope, and a Forensic Tool Under a Cloud”