2011 March - 16 articles
Developmental biology, regenerative medicine and cancer biology are more and more interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms controlling pluripotency and self-renewal in stem cells. Pluripotency is maintained by a synergistic interplay betw...
Meiosis is a highly conserved process, which is stringently regulated in all organisms, from fungi through to humans. Two major events define meiosis in eukaryotes. The first is the pairing, or synapsis, of homologous chromosomes and the second is th...
Embryonic stem (ES) and induced-pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be grown indefinitely under appropriate conditions whilst retaining the ability to differentiate to cells representative of the three primary germ layers. Such cells have the potenti...
Embryonic stem (ES) cells can differentiate into multiple types of cells belonging to all three germ layers. Although ES cells are clonally established, they display heterogeneous responses upon the induction of differentiation, resulting in a mixtur...
The SET and MYND (SMYD) family of lysine methyltransferases is defined by a SET domain that is split into two segments by a MYND domain, followed by a cysteine-rich post-SET domain. While members of the SMYD family are important in the SET-mediated r...
Gene conversion is one of the major mutational mechanisms involved in the DNA sequence evolution of duplicated genes. It contributes to create unique patters of DNA polymorphism within species and divergence between species. A typical pattern is so-c...
The study of meiosis is limited because of the intrinsic nature of gametogenesis in mammals. One way to overcome these limitations would be the use of culture systems that would allow meiotic progression in vitro. There have been some attempts to cul...
Mitochondria have their own genomic DNA. Unlike the nuclear genome, each cell contains hundreds to thousands of copies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). The copies of mtDNA tend to have heterogeneous sequences, due to the high frequency of mutagenesis, b...
The evolutionary impact of gene duplication events has been a theme of Drosophila genetics dating back to the Morgan School. While considerable attention has been placed on the genetic novelties that duplicates are capable of introducing, and the rol...
Neural stem cells (NSCs) are capable of producing a variety of neural cell types, and are indispensable for the development of the mammalian brain. NSCs can be induced in vitro from pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic stem cells and induced-p...
The dramatic discovery that somatic cells could be reprogrammed to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), by the expression of just four factors, has opened new opportunities for regenerative medicine and novel ways of modeling human diseases. Exten...
Polycomb group proteins (PcG) are major epigenetic regulators, essential for establishing heritable expression patterns of developmental control genes. The mouse PcG family member M33/Cbx2 (Chromobox homolog protein 2) is a component of the Polycomb-...
Angiosperm genomes differ from those of mammals by extensive and recursive polyploidizations. The resulting gene duplication provides opportunities both for genetic innovation, and for concerted evolution. Though most genes may escape conversion by t...
In spite of evolutionary conservation of meiosis, many of the genes that control mammalian meiosis are still unknown. We report here that the ENU-induced repro4 mutation, identified in a screen to uncover genes that control mouse meiosis, causes fail...
The TSPY gene stands out from all other human protein-coding genes because of its high copy number and tandemly-repeated organization. Here, we review its evolutionary history in great apes in order to assess whether these unusual properties are more...
Gene conversion is a type of homologous recombination that leads to transfer of genetic information among homologous DNA sequences. It can be categorized into two classes: homogenizing and diversifying gene conversions. The former class results in ne...
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