Blog Comments

Kinetica Online is pleased to provide direct links to commentaries from our senior editor Dr. Steven Pelech has posted on other blogs sites. Most of these comments appear on the GenomeWeb Daily Scan website, which in turn highlight interesting blogs that have been posted at numerous sites in the blogosphere since the beginning of 2010. A wide variety of topical subjects are covered ranging from the latest scientific breakthroughs, research trends, politics and career advice. The original blogs and Dr. Pelech’s comments are summarized here under the title of the original blog. Should viewers wish to add to these discussions, they should add their comments at the original blog sites.

The views expressed by Dr. Pelech do not necessarily reflect those of the other management and staff at Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation. However, we wish to encourage healthy debate that might spur improvements in how biomedical research is supported and conducted.

Sep 2013

The Sum of Your Experiences

David Dobbs at Pacific Standard magazine writes that your experiences can shape the expression patterns of your genes, and cited studies undertaken with kidnapped European honeybees that were raised with African bees and vice versa. The kidnapped bees exhibited the gene expression and behavior of their foster colony. Dobbs also described environment induce genetic changes in humans and other animals. S. Pelech argues that while altered gene expression clearly contributes to the phenotypic changes in behaviour, a variety of other interacting molecular and cellular intelligence systems play equally important roles. He also discusses the case of the domesticated pig that goes "hog wild."
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Surrounded by Viruses

Simon Anthony and his colleagues at Columbia University identified 58 viruses by genetic analyses in specimens sampled from the Indian Flying Fox, Pteropus giganteus, and based on this they extrapolated that there are at least 320,000 viruses waiting to be uncovered in other mammals. S. Pelech provides his own calculations for the number of mammalian viruses based also on the latest human virus data and comes up with a similar number. Read More...