Remember when Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996? That was the first cloned mammal and everyone freaked out thinking we would be cloning all our pets and even humans within a few years. Well, nearly 20 years have passed since then and reproductive cloning is still a very difficult and inefficient procedure. Most cloning … Continue reading Improving reproductive cloning
Transgenerational inheritance of fear
A new semester has begun and I have no extra time to update this blog, so just a short entry today. This paper was just too cool to pass up. It was published earlier this year in Nature Neuroscience by Dias and Ressler. They conducted a series of experiments which showed that learned fear can … Continue reading Transgenerational inheritance of fear
Isolation and drug addiction
We all know that adverse, early life experiences can affect normal development and the ability to lead a happy and healthy adult life. A number of recent studies have shown that rodents which are mistreated as pups have long lasting changes to their gene expression (i.e. epigenetics). They are more anxious and have a harder … Continue reading Isolation and drug addiction
The buzz about novelty-seeking
One topic I have always been interested in is how complex behaviors are driven by genetics and molecular biology. For instance, all the courtship rituals of a male fruit fly are basically encoded by a single gene, and more specifically one small exon (a chunk of DNA within a gene). A recent paper by Liang … Continue reading The buzz about novelty-seeking
Robin Ball 