Recognizing leprosy in wild chimpanzees
A story in Science has been making the rounds on my feeds about a newly-recognized problem in chimpanzee populations: “Leprosy, ancient scourge of humans, fo...
All posts tagged with disease
Link: Transmissible Alzheimer’s Disease?
Jennifer Frazer writes on the Scientific American blog site: “The Case for Transmissible Alzheimer’s Grows”.
Notable: Alzheimer’s risk and genetic background of ApoE
Notable paper: Rajabli F, Feliciano BE, Celis K, Hamilton-Nelson KL, Whitehead PL, Adams LD, et al. (2018) Ancestral origin of ApoE ε4 Alzheimer disease ris...
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 22
This, from ScienceAlert:
Link: Sleeping sickness hides in human skin
A news story by Michael Price in Science: “Sleeping sickness hides in human skin”.
Link: Saiga deaths linked to microbes
Carl Zimmer reports on some of the work being done to understand the extreme die-offs of saiga antelopes in Central Asia: “More Than Half of Entire Species o...
Notable: Tuberculosis strains in seventeenth-century Hungary
Notable paper: Kay, G. L. et al. (2015) Eighteenth-century genomes show that mixed infections were common at time of peak tuberculosis in Europe. Nat. Commun...
Herpes simplex virus 2 may have invaded ancient humans from chimpanzees
Did Homo erectus get herpes from chimps?
The fight against drug-resistant malaria
Ed Yong, writing for the new Wellcome Trust-sponsored science publication, Mosaic, has gone to Thailand to follow the development of artemisin-resistant mala...
"When you get a tick up your nose, you tell the story"
My University of Wisconsin-Madison colleague Tony Goldberg has a new paper doing some innovative ecological genetics: “UW scientist sniffs out possible new t...
XMRV saga develops
John Timmer’s reporting on the rise and fall of the hypothesis that XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome is the best I’ve seen so far on the topic: “How a Co...
Mailbag: Genetics of schizophrenia
Re: Schizophrenia
Worm me up
Robin Ann Smith contributed a guest post to Scientific American, titled “The worms within”. The main idea is that the immune system evolved to deal with para...
Plague from within
Ewen Callaway describes work probing the biology of a chimpanzee endogenous retrovirus: “Ancient chimp virus ‘brought back to life’”
Ridded of rinderpest
Donald McNeil, Jr.::
Scanning the ape fecome
Donald McNeil, Jr., has written up some background detail about last week’s story that falciparum malaria came from gorillas: “A finding on malaria comes fro...
Falciparum malaria came from gorillas
Malaria in humans is caused by one of five different species of Plasmodium parasites. The deadliest of these is P. falciparum, especially within Africa where...
Samurai lead poisoning
An interesting study has shown how people in the samurai class of Edo period Japan were poisoning their children with lead. The results are reported in a cur...
Malaria book
A new book by Sonia Shah covers the history of malaria and the way it affects people today around the world: The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 5...
Sergey Brin and genetic research
While I was out of town, Wired ran a long article about Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his quest to find the genetic causes of Parkinson’s disease. There i...
Fatigued by advocates impeding research
Science has a news article that details the conflict over publishing new research on a viral cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS): “Conflicting Papers on ...
Smallpox vaccine and HIV
A new paper claims that HIV infection may be impeded in individuals who had the smallpox vaccine:
Sickle cell chimeras
Many of us use sickle cell as an example in classes. I always do so while noting the progress that has been made in treating the condition in Westernized con...
Dracunculiasis
The NYT reports that Nigeria has been free of guinea worm infections for a year.
Leprosy evolution in humans
Where did leprosy come from as a human pathogen, and how did it spread through the world? Two years ago, this new research would have merited a whole book. N...
Flu blues
Will the swine flu lead to the next big evolutionary change for humans? No. But it has already begun to affect the way people interact with each other. I wan...
HIV from gorillas
A new strain of HIV has come from gorillas: “New Strain of H.I.V. Is Discovered”
Primate genomics: the Duffy (FY) gene, malaria, and baboons
Jenny Tung of Duke University and colleagues report in Nature (online early) that yellow baboons have evolved a Duffy antigen-related defense against a baboo...
Bigger brains, more cancer?
Rachael Rettner reports on a hypothesis that human cancer risk may be a side-effect of brain evolution. The hypothesis emerges from studies of gene expressio...
Richard Lewontin: "[T]oo rapid for genetic adaptation"
I have had a New York Review of Books essay by Richard Lewontin, titled, “Why Darwin?” on my desktop for a week without getting to the last section of it.
Bone is super-interesting, but not an energy sink
Natalie Angier’s article, “Bone, a masterpiece of elastic strength,” is pretty cool. It describes the case of Harry Eastlack, a sufferer from fibrodysplasia ...
Maybe it's just that pink is a tropical color and blue a polar one?
Dienekes points me to a paper with a straightforward title: “Humans at tropical latitudes produce more females”.
Bill Gates, bioterrorist wannabe
Well, when you’ve got a captive audience….
Glucose metabolism and memory
Roni Caryn Rabin reports on a study linking blood glucose spikes to age-related memory decline:
Columbus, smallpox and global cooling
Claims that the rapid depopulation of the Americas around 1500 AD, leading to abandonment of cleared lands and reforestation, may have intensified the Little...
When disease strikes an island species
Jennifer Viegas writes an interesting story about a new study that shows the extinction of Christmas Island rats was driven by black rat diseases:
Terry Pratchett describes his Alzheimer's
I know many readers are fans of Terry Pratchett, as I am. He has a long, heartfelt article about his experiences with PCA, a type of early-onset Alzheimer’s....
Endogenous retrovirus story
Earlier this week, the Washington Post printed a nice David Brown story about endogenous retroviruses and evolution.
1918 flu antibodies still pulse on
The immune system’s long memory:
Tuberculosis is interesting, but a lot older than 10,000 years
Hebrew University has issued a press release about ongoing research on human and animal bones from the Jericho excavations. They’re looking for signs of tube...
Life history and disease in Tasmanian devils
The keywords to the article include, “carnivorous marsupial” and “precocious breeding.” What better teaser could you possibly hope for?
The genetic networks underlying disease
Last week, the NY Times printed an interesting article by Andrew Pollack, titled "Redefining disease, genes and all." The article explores recent (and ongoi...
Zimmer on E. coli and bioterror
I very much liked Carl Zimmer's Slate piece about foodborne pathogens and their lessons for defending against bioterrorism. Zimmer has a book about E. coli ...
Great apes and human diseases: how primatologists hurt and help
A new paper in Current Biology documents the mortality suffered by Taï Forest chimpanzees as a result of common human respiratory ailments during the l...
Drugging brains, young and old
I read two interesting articles today on brain performance-enhancing of one kind or another. Denise Grady of the New York Times contributes a long article a...
Whole-genome studies of viruses: future studies of people?
Viral evolution is different from human evolution chiefly because viruses mutate faster, exist in larger populations, have much shorter generations, and hav...
Story of a sickle cell survivor
A nice essay by Dr. Barron H. Lerner in the New York Times looks at a long-time survivor of sickle cell anemia, and the ways that treatment options have dev...
The appendix: not just for appendectomies anymore?
In a paper in press in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Randal Bollinger and colleagues suggest that the human vermiform appendix functions as a "safe ho...
HIV genetics by the genome
A new whole-genome association study has found more genetic variants protective against HIV. The course of HIV infection is variable, even in the absence of...
Coming next: virus toothpaste?
I couldn't help but wonder after reading this story:
Fumarase deficiency in Colorado City
Another reason to avoid inbreeding:
Darwin on disease and indigenous populations
Alfred Crosby gives a short quote from chapter 19 of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and I found it interesting enough to look for the full context. Voya...
Mitochondrial notes
Here's an interesting abstract from a 2005 review paper by Ann Gardner and Richard Boles:
Rett syndrome progress
Nick Wade has an article about progress toward a treatment for Rett syndrome, a form of autism that almost exclusively affects females.
Gorilla SIV distribution
Nature has a little article this week by Fran Van Heuverswyn et al. announcing that SIV (the primate relative of HIV) has been found in wild populations of ...
Reviving old viruses buried in the genome
This story caught my attention:
DDT and the malaria wars
I'll be lecturing on hemoglobinopathies again this week, and I stumbled across this 2001 article by Malcolm Gladwell, profiling Fred Soper and the early 20t...
Prostate risk allele differs in Europeans and Africans
Thanks to an enterprising student, I have an AP story about the discovery of a risk allele for prostate cancer that has different frequencies in different g...
mtDNA damage in Parkinson's and aging
There is a nice short review by Giovanni Manfredi in the current Nature Genetics on mtDNA damage and Parkinson's. The paper is really a perspective accompan...
Skin healing in overdrive
The NIH is reporting on the role of connexin 26 in psoriasis and eczema (via Science Blog):
Mitochondrial disease minireview
This week's Nature had a news feature by Nick Lane about mitochondrial disease. I found it interesting because it focuses not only on disorders associated w...
The selective pressure of childbed fever
A new paper in PLoS Biology by Xiaoxia Wang and colleagues finds that a gene called CASPASE12 (OMIM) has been under recent selection in humans. The twist is...
Malaria genetic review
On the subject of malaria defenses, I also ran across this review article from last year by Dominic Kwiatkowski.
Looking for a G6PD review?
I'm linking to this 1994 review article by Ernest Beutler (straight to PDF) because (a) it has over 400 references that pretty much cover every bit of G6PD ...
Mosquito evolution, chromosomal differentiation, and introgression
This paragraph from Ayala and Coluzzi (2005) gives an admirable synopsis of the causes for the evolution of falciparum malaria-bearing mosquito Anopheles ga...
Prion protein essential for hematopoiesis
On the subject of why the PrP gene is evolving in humans, it is worth pointing to this new paper:
Ewald bird flu spat
Scientific American has an editors' blog, SciAm Observations. I point to it because a series of recent posts has included an interesting exchange among evol...
CCR5Δ32 evolutionary history
A new paper in PLoS Biology examines the recent evolution and dispersal of the Δ32 allele at the CCR5 locus (via Gene Expression). The introduction has...
Prehistory of falciparum malaria
Martin and colleagues (2005) have a PNAS paper examining the coevolution of falciparum malaria (Plasmodium falciparum) with early humans.