/sci/ - Science & Math

Telomeres. Any promising new developments for keeping them longer...longer?

Is there any evidence that human mutation rate has decreased or increased over the past ten thousand years?

Have any of the papers you're reading made you want to face palm yet?

How long until old age is conquerable?

>>2838400
Hey, OP here. The problem with these is that with every replication, your DNA actually gets longer due to telomere replication, so eventually the cell just runs out of space storing your massive DNA and can no longer keep dividing and growing. So no, we've pretty much done all we've can but there's no way to do that without actually modifying your cells to increase their volume.

>>2838395

I'm thinking about pursuing genetics or bioinformatics in grad school.
I'm an undergrad majoring in biology and double minoring in computer science and math.
How much potential do you see for the applications of compsci to genetics? Would it more database oriented or more computation with algorithims?

Also, how much chemistry and math would you recommend taking in undergrad?

>>2838400
I don't study that topic much but one of the PIs at my school studies telomere regulation, but I'm not sure how much one would want active telomerase in cells as without some way of preventing DNA damage.

>>2838434
Don't listen to this person he's batshit insane

>>2838405
I don't know about it increasing or decreasing, but I can tell you that with all repair mechanisms and the fidelity of replication machinery there is only a mistake in DNA replication once per 10^9 bases added. But for mutation as say from the Sun or some other chemical mutagen when it comes to alleles it's extremely hard for a new "mutant" allele to gain a foothold in a relatively large population and often go to fixation at 0 relatively quickly.

>>2838411
I have read some papers that have gotten in to Nature that have made some really crazy claims that can't really be substantiated based on what they show and I have no idea how they got into those journals.


>>2838416
Hopefully soon, there have been a lot of genetic screens in flies, yeast, and nematodes looking for genes that make organisms live longer. Recently the chemical Thioflavin T (dye Yellow-1, I think) was shown to increase nematode lifespan possibly by preventing proteins from misfolding and aggregating thereby killing the cells.

>>2838440

Thanks. I was actually hoping this question would shed light on if our evolution as a species has changed pace at all.

>>2838438
OP here, I'd recommend taking as much theoretical math courses as you can: graph theory and set theory espcially. They come in very handy in the study of genetics especially when you consider that the passing of genetics can be modeled as a graph and that genetic replication itself is easily modeled as a set.

>>2838438
A field you might really want to look in to is high throughput DNA sequencing specifially RNAseq. My lab is just starting to get into this a lot with 3 different people in my lab doing various projects with it. There are tons of papers being published in nature, cell, and science every month with these kinds of projects. It's kind of the flavor of things right now, it will be for a while and it seems to be very powerful tool so knowing how to work with computers, program, and analyze these data sets would be very attractive to future graduate programs.

Things are only going to get better once we get single cell sequencing which I think will happen withing 5-10 years

>>2838500
Thanks loads OP, I'll certainly look into it.
:)

>>2838395
hey, what did you major in in undergrad and what was your gpa?

i'm thinking of doing graduate genetics if i lose interest in this whole med school thing

>>2838487
lol @ graph theory and theoretical math. Silly troll.

how is babby formed

>>2838732
I majored in molecular genetics and I forget my GPA exactly. I think it was around a 3.6ish. A more important thing is your test scores and lab experience.

If your interested in genetics but also medicine I would look into an MD/PhD program and then think about possibly specializing in Medical Genetics. Apparently it is a very in demand field and once you get to that level will be in very high demand.

>>2838744
This is a very long and complicated answer I don't really have the room to type out that involves large cell migrations and morphogen gradients.

please help me, how do I interpret northern and southern blots?

>>2838500

And thats why I'll be doing my PhD in computational biology to make use of all these fun new tools, can't wait.

>>2838774
wait, people still do Northern blots??

>>2838793
No, but my 80 year old genetics teacher has assigned a problem where we have to deduce the function of five fictional genes involved in brain cell differentiation based on northern and southern blots and differential splicing (like, a single gene can be translated as multiple different polypeptides depending on which exons are spliced out).

>>2838810
okay, and what is it that you don't understand?

>>2838819
It's all a little vague to me, but I shouldn't be asking for help anyways, it's against the honor code of my university... never mind.

>>2838834
Okay. Good for you bro, but just remember that you can only detect things that are complementary to your probe