Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Linda Hamilton and Ludwig van Beethoven all had (or may have had) bipolar disorder. Eugene O’Neill suffered from depression, as did Brooke Shields after the birth of her baby. The link between creativity and mental illness has long been reported on an anecdotal basis, and a study reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry does seem to support this connection.
genetic archive.
To celebrate the New Year, we bring you the top ten posts of 2011.
On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me… ten lords-a-leaping. Transposons, also known as transposable elements or jumping genes, are small stretches of DNA that can move around the genome.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me… four calling birds. These are actually colly birds, otherwise known as blackbirds.
Researchers have made a step forward in the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy, a serious genetic disorder, by using a stretch of RNA to trigger mice into producing a back-up version of a missing protein.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a delayed development disorder, including social, communication and cognitive problems. ASD seems to have strong genetic links – the concordance rate of fraternal to identical twins is 10 to 1 – and is three to four times more common in boys than girls, which suggests a link to the X chromosome. Researchers in the USA have found an X-linked gene that may play a role in ASD risk.
Cystic fibrosis is a homozygous recessive genetic disease caused by a mutation in CFTR, the gene that encodes the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, an ion channel. Trudi McDevitt of the National Centre for Medical Genetics, Dublin, presented on her team’s search for a new diagnostic screening tool at Planet xMAP in Vienna.
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be a lot in common between amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and dementia. ALS affects motor neurones, leading to muscle twitching, weakness and paralysis. Frontotemporal dementia (FTD; also known as Pick’s disease) is the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease, and causes disinhibition (inappropriate behaviour) and cognitive problems. However, two groups of scientists have (independently) discovered a genetic link between the two disorders.
The tammar wallaby (Macropus eugenii) is the smallest species of wallaby and is used in studies as a model member of the kangaroo and wallaby family. Australian researchers have sequenced its genome and published papers on marsupial biology and evolution in a number of journals.
There has been a flurry of new genomes and genome analysis over the past few weeks – a rodent, a snake, a coral and a lizard, and a controversy over the genome of a fish.
