Quotes About Chromosomes

The idea that cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, just waiting to be corrupted or inactivated and thereby unleashing cancer, is, of course, one of the seminal ideas of oncology.

twenty-three chromosomes lie 3.2 billion ATCGs. All of this code equals one human genome, which you could print out in a very boring 6.4-million-page book. A strand of DNA is so thin (two molecules across) that if all of the chromosomes in a single cell were stretched

Telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. As telomeres become shorter, then cells age and die more quickly. In simple terms, as your telomeres get shorter, your life gets shorter.

Sex really is binary. No question about it. You're either male or female, and it's absolutely clear. You can do it on gamete size, you can do it on chromosomes. To me as a biologist, it's distinctly weird that people can simply declare I am a woman, though I have a penis.

Biologically, humans are divided into males and females. A male Homo sapiens has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome; a female Homo sapiens has two Xs. But 'man' and 'woman' name social, not biological, categories.

This supercoiling is nature's way of fitting three billion base pairs of DNA inside a microscopic cell. If you uncoiled the DNA in a single cell and stretched it out, it would be over six feet long.

To be exact, there are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in the human body, and each chromosome is packed with genes, and each gene holds myriad genetic information," Catherine explained. "My family

I write poetry because my genes and chromosomes fall in love with young men not young women.

Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes.

The X chromosome does most of the heavy developmental lifting, while the little Y has been shedding its associated genes at a rate of about five every one million years, committing suicide in slow motion. It's now down to less than 100 genes. By comparison, the X chromosome carries about 1,500 genes, all necessary participants in embryonic construction projects. These are not showing any signs of decay.

If we think of our chromosomes - they carry our genetic material - as being like shoelaces, I work on the plastic tips at the end that protect them.

Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes in cells. Chromosomes carry the genetic information. Telomeres are buffers. They are like the tips of shoelaces. If you lose the tips, the ends start fraying.

In my lab, we're finding that psychological stress actually ages cells, which can be seen when you measure the wearing down of the tips of the chromosomes, those telomeres.

The problem began with his telomeres. What is a telomere? Picture the little plastic bits on the end of your shoelaces. Imagine each time you tie your shoes, you have to clip off a little bit of that plastic part to get it to go through the lace holes. After you've done this enough times, the plastic tip is gone and the shoelace starts to unravel. Once the laces unravel enough, it's impossible to tie your shoes, and you walk around looking like a goober.

Dr. Deanna Adkins of Duke University School of Medicine claims that gender identity is "the only medically supported determinant of sex," adding, "It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.

A key example is a human cell, which is the simplest thing in biology. When it comes to how it divides, biologists will talk about spindles forming and dividing chromosomes, but they are merely describing what the cell is doing.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

É claro que não há um único gene, mas há algo infinitamente mais enaltecedor e magnífico: toda uma naturza humana, flexivelmente pré-ordenada em nossos cromossomos e indiossincrática de cada um de nós. Todo mundo tem uma única e distina natureza endógena. Um self.

An extraordinarily nimble synthesist, Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual differences and even intelligence. More important, though, he addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the reductionist danger in equating inheritability with inevitability." —The New Yorker

Suppose, for instance, that a gene appeared on the X chromosome that specified the recipe for a lethal poison that killed only sperm carrying Y chromosomes. A man with such a gene would have no fewer children than another man. But he would have all daughters and no sons.

Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the ability to resist seduction by a man was good for X chromosomes in the past.

But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow.

We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.

Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away. Landsman looks away.