Humans normally have 46 chromosomes in each cell, divided into 23 pairs. Two copies of chromosome 8, one copy inherited from each parent, form one of the pairs. Chromosome 8 spans about 146 million DNA building blocks (base pairs) and represents between 4.5 percent and 5 percent of the total DNA in cells.
Identifying genes on each chromosome is an active area of genetic research. Because researchers use different approaches to predict the number of genes on each chromosome, the estimated number of genes varies. Chromosome 8 likely contains between 700 and 1,100 genes.
Genes on chromosome 8 are among the estimated 20,000 to 25,000 total genes in the human genome.
A gene that is strongly associated with a risk of developing childhood onset asthma was identified by an international team of scientists, whose findings are published in the journal Nature.
Large, seemingly useless pieces of RNA - a molecule originally considered only a lowly messenger for DNA - play an important role in letting cells know where they are in the body and what they are supposed to become, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered.
Submarines have periscopes. Insects have antennae. And increasingly, biologists are finding that most normal vertebrate cells have cilia, small hair-like structures that protrude like antennae into the surrounding environment to detect signals that control cell growth.
A protein long known to be involved in protecting a cell from genetic damage has been found to play an even more important role in protecting the cell's offspring.
PLoS ONE has just published a study which defines a gene locus on chromosome 1 that predicts prognosis of brain tumor patients and may even set the basis for the development of more efficient drugs to combat brain cancer.
Scientists in the United States have been able to reverse the effects of autism in specially bred mice.
Researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have, for the first time, reversed symptoms of mental retardation and autism in mice.
Mushrooms might serve as biofactories for the production of various beneficial human drugs, according to plant pathologists who have inserted new genes into mushrooms.
Researchers funded in part by the National Institutes of Health have identified the gene that accounts for most cases of Goltz syndrome, a rare skin disorder that can also affect bone and eye development.
"Cell division is one of the most fundamental aspects of biology, the process that makes life," says Iain Cheeseman, PhD. "And it has an intrinsic beauty."
Non-invasive screening of pregnant women with ultrasound early in pregnancy, combined with maternal blood analysis, has reduced the number of children born in Denmark with Down Syndrome by 50%, a scientist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today.
Genes account for only 2.5 percent of DNA in the human genetic blueprint, yet diseases can result not only from mutant genes, but from mutations of other DNA that controls genes.
Their finding is the first to link individual differences written into the genetic code with a vaccine-related complication, albeit a mild one.
Not so long ago, the difficult-to-sequence, highly repetitive, gene-poor DNA found in regions of chromosomes known as heterochromatin was called "junk." Like dark matter in the universe, the true nature of heterochromatin was unknown.
A team of researchers led by University of Virginia Health System geneticists has uncovered a major secret in the mystery of how the DNA helix replicates itself time after time.
The study, published in the July 15th issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online, may have implications for predicting adverse events from other live vaccines. .
Investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have used the lowly yeast to gain insights into how a dividing human cell ensures that an identical set of chromosomes gets passed on to each new daughter cell.
A human cell contains an enormous 1.8 metres of DNA partitioned into 46 chromosomes.
A University of Warwick physicist has uncovered how female cells are able to choose randomly between their two X chromosomes and why that choice is always lucky.
The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, the largest ever study of the genetics behind common diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and coronary heart disease, publishes its results in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics.
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