Sandwalk

A few months ago, the press office of the University of California at San Diego issued a press release with a provocative title ... Illu...

Richard ("Rick") Young is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Whitehead Insti...

The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) is a large-scale, and very expensive, attempt to map all of the functional elements in the human g...

The coronavirus life cycle is depicted in a figure from Fung and Liu (2019). See below for a brief description. The virus particle attaches...

Coronaviruses are RNA viruses, which means that their genome is RNA, not DNA. All of the coronaviruses have similar genomes but I'm sur...

Splice variants are very common in eukaryotes. We know that it's possible to detect dozens of different splice variants for each gene wi...

If you look in the various databases you'll see that most human genes have multiple transcription start sites. The evidence for the exis...

I'm convinced that widespread alternative splicing does not occur in humans or in any other species. It's true that the phenomenon e...

As most of you know, I'm interested in the problem of alternative splicing. I believe that the number of splice variants that have been ...

Kostas Kampourakis is a specialist in science education at the University of Geneva, Geneva (Switzerland). Most of his book is an argument a...

This is a post about alternative splicing. I've avoided using that term in the title because it's very misleading. Alternative splic...

Some beating of dead horses may be ethical, where here and there they display unexpected twitches that look like life. Zuckerkandl and Pau...

I'm working (slowly) on a book called What's in Your Genome?: 90% of your genome is junk! The first chapter is an introduction to g...

Kat Arney has written a very good book on genes and gene expression. She covers all the important controversies in a thorough and thoughtful...

Mammals have two sex chromosomes: X and Y. Males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome and females have two X chromosomes. Since female...

All available evidence suggests that about 90% of our genome is junk DNA. Many scientists are reluctant to accept this evidence—some of them...

Proponents of massive alternative splicing argue that most human genes produce many different protein isoforms. According to these scientist...

There are two competing worldviews in the fields of biochemistry and molecular biology. The distinction was captured a few years ago by Laur...

A reader directed me to a 2015 ENCODE workshop with online videos of all the presentations [ From Genome Function to Biomedical Insight: ENC...

"Epigenetics" is the (relatively) new buzzword. Old-fashioned genetics is boring so if you want to convince people (and grant agen...