X chromosome inactivation involves a random choice to silence either X chromosome early in mammalian female development. Once silenced the inactive X is stably inherited through subsequent somatic cell divisions, and thus, females are generally mosaics, having a mixture of cells with one or the other parental X active. While in most females the number of cells with either X being active is roug...

Chromosome abnormalities in humans are strikingly associated with increasing maternal age. Studies in mice implicate loss of chromosome cohesion as an important cause of age-related meiotic errors in the oocyte.

Folk beliefs associated with death and disease can impact on the bioarcheological record. Unusual postmortem actions by humans and distinctive paleopathological evidence may be clues to these beliefs. This report presents bioarcheological and paleopathological evidence in support of a 19th century New England folk belief in vampires with a particular reference to a colonial period burial. The N...

The aim of this study was to analyse homology in the telomeric region of chromosome 11 in humans and a corresponding fragment in the porcine genome using the FISH technique. The human band specific probe (HSA 11p15) was used for hybridization with pig chromosomes. The obtained results showed strong signals on human chromosome 11p15, as well as pig chromosome 2p17. Some aspects of the similarity...

Ploidy: the number of copies of each chromosome that is contained in somatic (non-gamete) cells of a species. In humans and most other animal species, the somatic cells are usually diploid, meaning they have 2 copies of each chromosome, whereas the gamete cells are haploid and have a single copy of each chromosome. Some plant and animal species are known to have more than 2 copies of each chrom...

Structural neuroimaging of humans with typical and atypical sex-chromosome complements has established the marked influence of both Yand X-/Y-chromosome dosage on total brain volume (TBV) and identified potential cortical substrates for the psychiatric phenotypes associated with sex-chromosome aneuploidy (SCA). Here, in a cohort of 354 humans with varying karyotypes (XX, XY, XXX, XXY, XYY, XXYY...

BRCA1, located at 17q21.31 in humans, is a significant gene in familial breast and ovarian cancer. BRCA1 functions as an important regulator of pathways governing DNA repair, cellcycle progression, ubiquitylation and transcriptional regulation in mammals. Orthologs are not found in the yeast, fly or worm genomes (Venkitaraman, 2002; Narod and Foulkes, 2004). Previously SOX9, located at 17q24.3 ...