Gene deserts bear fruit

Legume flowers bear fruit.

A fter the grasses, the legume family (which includes peas, beans, and soya) is the plant group of greatest importance to mankind. The legume family is a source of products and services from tropical timber to atmospheric nitrogen fixation. As the botanist E. J. H. Corner (1) put it, ‘‘From arctic circle to tropics, desert to pergola, bacteria to plough, field to mouth, and legend to science, L...

Chemoprevention: increased potential to bear fruit.

T prevention of degenerative disease through dietary intervention (chemoprevention), either by the recommendation of specific diets or by the use of dietary supplements, has enormous potential for improving human health. This is particularly the case for the prevention of cancer, where current therapeutic approaches are crude or limited. It has been appreciated through history that diet can aff...

Food Deserts

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), including heart disease and stroke, is the leading cause of death in the United States, producing an immense health and economic burden. An estimated 92.1 million US adults are diagnosed with at least one type of CVD, and a projected 43.9% of US adults will have some form of CVD by 2030. One of the primary reasons for the continued high burden of CVD is the persist...

Scanning human gene deserts for long-range enhancers.

Evolution and functional classification of vertebrate gene deserts.

Large tracts of the human genome, known as gene deserts, are devoid of protein-coding genes. Dichotomy in their level of conservation with chicken separates these regions into two distinct categories, stable and variable. The separation is not caused by differences in rates of neutral evolution but instead appears to be related to different biological functions of stable and variable gene deser...