A team of University of Oregon biologists, using fruit flies, has created a way to isolate RNA from specific cells, opening a new window on how gene expression drives normal development and disease-causing breakdowns.

Anyone with a sweet tooth knows that too much of a good thing can lead to negative consequences. The same can be said about the signals that help maintain nerve cells, as demonstrated in a new study of myelin, a protein key to efficient neuronal transmission.

Genes talk to themselves and to each other to control how a given cell manufactures proteins. But variation in the control of the same gene in two different tissues may contribute to certain human traits, including the likelihood of getting a disease, said a team of geneticists and neuroscientists at Duke University Medical Center.

The more often a gene is differentially expressed, the more likely it is to contain disease-associated DNA variants.

The amount of proteins produced in cells—a fundamental determinant of biological outcomes collectively known as gene expression—varies in African American individuals depending on their proportion of African or European genetic ancestry.

A gene contained in laboratory yeast has helped an international team of researchers uncover new findings about the process by which protein molecules bind to control sequences in genes in order to initiate gene expression, according to findings reported in the journal Nature.

The latest breakthrough in a 120 year-old debate on the evolution of the bird wing was published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, October 3, by Alexander Vargas and colleagues at Yale University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

MicroRNAs, the tiny molecules that fine-tune gene expression, were first discovered in 1993. But it turns out they've been around for a billion years.

The Stowers Institute’s Conaway Lab has demonstrated that an enzyme called Uch37 is kept in check when it is part of a human chromatin remodeling complex, INO80. The results were published in today’s issue of Molecular Cell.

An effort to detect patterns of chemical changes in histones and their impact on gene expression

A University of Michigan study reveals in detail how breast cells produce new cells that are predisposed to become cancerous, unless they receive the protective action of the CHFR gene.

Gene-expression data from liver tissue or whole blood can be used to classify histopathologic differences in the effects of hepatotoxins. It is hoped that these findings, published in BioMed Central's open access journal, Genome Biology, will lead to a more precise way of defining the potential hepatotoxicity of new compounds.