Genetics is the branch of biology that deals with the transmission and variation of inherited characteristics, particularly chromosomes and DNA.
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DNA replication Okazaki fragments
I understand multiple origin bubbles; DNA polymerase only synthesizes DNA from 5' to 3' and all that. But what I don't understand is why it has to be in fragments. Yes, DNA is anti parallel, and so ...
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How is the exogenous DNA protected from degradation during bacterial transformation?
During transformation, a bacterium can take up DNA from its environment. A small fraction of bacterial species are known to be naturally competent, meaning that they can engage in this sort of ...
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Low complexity region and relaxed selection
I'm reading a text (Wagner, 2007) on identifying positive selection. In paper, the author says that low complexity regions are known to be associated with relaxed selection. I'm trying to understand ...
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How did the activities of protocols become inheritable?
I have learned that first a protocell came to exist and its characteristics came to be passed on by genetic material. So how come genes for all the activities come to incorporate into genetic ...
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TCGA data, and bioinformatics design questions for SNP/ mirna analysis
It's my first time posting to this forum but was looking for some help on the data aspects of this project.
My tools of choice would be in python/R .
Goal: I'm looking to create a disease specific ...
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paralogue genes in genome-wide association studies?
Has anybody tested if there is an over-representation of significant paralogous copies of genes -- either tandemly-arranged or in different chromosomes -- in the list of significantly associated genes ...
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What is the frequency of double-hets between parent and child?
Say both parent and child are genotyped for all SNPs. In this setup we are only looking at variant positions between one parent and child - so neither parent nor child are homozygous reference (no ...
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What are polytene bands, and why are they there?
Drosophila polytene chromosomes have been particularly useful in genetic research, as it made cytogenetic gene mapping possible with very little effort. This was primarily accomplished due to polytene ...
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Terminology question: the scope of an allele in an organism
Let us consider a gene FOO with novel type foo.
If I were discussing an organism that has inherited foo in every cell during classical zygote formation, then I would ordinarily just say that the ...
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How does a plant decide when to grow a branch?
As a plant grows, at some point the first branch forms. As it continues, branches grow new branches, and so on, in a seemingly random way. Is it random, or is it driven by the environment (heat or ...
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effect of background selection on promoter regions compared to distant enhancers?
Has anyone looked at the effect of background selection on the levels of conservation of promoter regions compared to distant enhancers? Do promoter regions have a higher conservation due to ...
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Is there a gene that starts meiosis 2?
Yesterday I thought about a question and asked it to my friend. The question was
which gene is completely the same for a male cell that made meiosis 1 recently.
My answer was the gene that starts ...
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What is the minimum population size that Hardy-Weinberg calculations can be applied to?
I'm trying to find out if a particular allele is in Hardy-Weinberg disequilibrium, but the data is poor. What's the minimum population number that you can use to get any sort of respectable ...
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Can mammals from different species reproduce?
I'm curious on how genetically different can two animals be in order to reproduce. Could they belong to different species?
One example is the mule which is the offspring of a donkey and a horse, in ...
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Extreme examples of protein translation/use coupling/decoupling?
What are known extreme examples of protein translation/effect coupling/decoupling? For example, examples of proteins that are immediately used at the time the have been translated and vice versa, ...
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Recombination-based vs. Sequence-based genetic mapping
Now that sequencing is becoming increasingly cheap, what is the value of recombination-based genetic mapping against the sequence-based genetic mapping?
I think that in the past recombination-based ...
