Evolution
LabBook July 6, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
Like Father Like Son, Even In Song
Kids learn a lot of things from their dads: how to play catch, how to shave, how to drive. In many cases, it’s obvious that sons have even learned how to talk from their father. Though their voices may be different, the words they use or their pronunciation or mannerisms can be very similar from […]
LabBook June 18, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our new weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday (or, occasionally, Monday -ed), LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent […]
Where We Split From Sharks
Over 400 million years ago, fish went through an evolutionary divorce that would someday be very relevant to humans. The split produced the two major groups of fish we see in our world today: those with skeletons of bone, which make up the majority of aquatic life, and those with cartilaginous skeletons, which today include […]
LabBook: May 25, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our new weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. […]
The Eel-Like Fish With a Human-Like Spine
By Rob Mitchum Us land animals like to think we’re so special. For instance, our spines are typically organized into five regions — cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral, and caudal — each with their own distinct vertebral anatomy. Because aquatic species often have much simpler spinal morphology, usually split into mere body and tail segments, paleontologists […]
The Secret Origin of the Vertebrate Brain
By Rob Mitchum The acorn worm is an eye-less, ear-less invertebrate that lives in the intertidal zone, scavenging food particles from the sand and water. One wouldn’t expect to find the developmental clues for the creation of the vertebrate brain in such a humble creature. But a new study led by a University of Chicago […]
A Nano-Vehicle to Fight Brain Cancer
By Rob Mitchum Treating a brain tumor in a lab dish is easy. Scientists have developed a full arsenal of treatments to kill tumor cells, using natural toxins, chemotherapeutic drugs, and even gene therapy to send them to an early grave. But making those therapies work in the actual setting of the brain is a […]
Evolution and the Unraveling of DNA
By Rob Mitchum In cells, DNA doesn’t often hang out in the long, stretched-out strings you see in science textbooks. Most of the time, it is stored tight in a package called a nucleosome, wound like a ball of yarn around a protein called chromatin. In order for a gene to be “activated,” the stretch […]
