Can this one-time treatment control cholesterol?
TBXT: A gene that helped in our evolutionary ancestors’ tail loss? The case of Xia and Malte Spielmann
Xia and his colleagues now have an answer. The researchers identified a genetic change shared by humans and other apes that might have contributed to their ancestors’ tail loss, some 25 million years ago.
Yanai says the extra experiments added rigour to the study, even if the overall conclusion is largely the same. Making all those mouse lines is a big undertaking, says Konkel, an evolutionary geneticist. When I saw what those authors did, I really felt for them.
On a hunch, Xia decided to examine a gene famous for its role in tail development. In 1927, Ukrainian scientist Nadine Dobrovolskaya-Zavadskaya described a strain of short-tailed lab mouse that, she proposed, carried a mutation in a gene called
T
, the human equivalent of which is now known as
TBXT
. “You’ll find this gene in your first Google search,” says Xia.
Malte Spielmann, a human geneticist at Kiel University in Germany, is respectful of the authors. “I’m incredibly excited about the fact that they’ve really pulled it off.”
Bo was recovering from a tailbone injury while he was doing his PhD at New York University, and he asked that question as a child, which was on his mind again recently.
Nature Podcast: Uncovers the origins of cosmic reionization through the lens of black hole haloes and jusp galaxies
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To combat high cholesterol, many people take statins, but because these drugs have to be taken every day researchers have been searching for alternatives. Controlling cholesterol by editing the epigenome has shown promise in lab-grown cells, but its efficacy in animals was unclear. Researchers have shown the approach works in mice, and that it can be used to silence genes linked to high cholesterol. The mice show markedly lowered cholesterol, a result the team hope could pave the way for epigenetic therapeutics for humans.
The Universe had a dense fog of neutral hydrogen that blocked certain wavelengths of light 13 billion years ago. The source of reionization radiation has been debated, but it was a process that hit the hydrogen and lifted the fog. Scientists using the JWST discovered that charged particles from dwarf galaxies appear to be the main driver for reionization. This finding could help researchers understand how some of the structures we now see in the Universe were formed.
