Articles by Caroline Seydel (19 results)

Sydney Brenner famously noted that progress in genetics “depends on the interplay between new techniques, new discoveries, and new ideas, probably in that order of decreasing importance.” In the 40 years since those words were recorded, new techniques have propelled the field of molecular biology to heights barely imagined at its inception. This year’s recipient…

Every lab wants to produce high-quality, reproducible data. But when that data is destined for use by the whole community as part of an international consortium, there is an even greater incentive to ensure the highest standards. A new paper in G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics defines a critical step for the success of widely-used gene regulation experiments.   …

Failure of chromosomes to segregate properly results in severe medical conditions, or even death. Yet for a long time, it was challenging to study exactly how chromosomes carry out their complex choreography, due to a lack of robust tools for combining chromosome visualization and genetic experiments.  Douglas Koshland spent his postdoc studying mammalian chromosome biology…

Ed Smith knows the power of having footsteps to follow. Six of his older brothers earned PhDs, he says, and observing their experiences helped him set his course. “It was important to me to learn from them,” he says. “If you have a good role model, you’ll be able to follow their paths, and you…

One of life’s great mysteries is how a single egg cell can contain all the information needed to create a fully specialized complex organism, including more egg cells. Ruth Lehmann, director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, has done a tremendous amount to solve that mystery. Beginning in her graduate student days, she uncovered a…

Geneticists dig up the dirt on 300 years of succulence. When Steve Knapp started his new job at the University of California, Davis, he plunged into a forensic mystery that would take years to unravel. He wasn’t hunting a criminal or identifying a missing person, but the challenge before him was just as formidable: reconstructing…

After giving a talk in Seattle about chromosome pairing, Chao-ting (Ting) Wu boarded the redeye flight back to Boston and settled in to read a new research paper on an odd new discovery in the human genome. “It was so exciting, I had to get up and walk around on the plane,” she says. “I…

NUN bodies in C. elegans offer clues about nervous system differentiation. One of the most active areas of research today explores the differences between individual cell types and how cells become differentiated. This specialization of cell types relies on changes in gene expression, but how those changes are orchestrated remains unknown. Now, research published in…