The study found that snow leopards eat mostly ungulates, which was no surprise. But the researchers also found the remains of one solitary chukar partridge. If you would like to live like that adventurous bird-eating snow leopard, here’s a University of California extension document on raising chukar partridges. Like snow leopards, chukar partridges are native to Eurasia, but unlike snow leopards, they have been introduced to the western U.S.

Illustration: ”The Cat: An introduction to the study of backboned animals” by St. George Mivart, 1881

Viruses are pretty neat. Look at this picture. The big round gray thing is one individual Cafeteria roenbergensis. (The host.) See all the little hexagons inside? Those are the virus.

photo by M.G. Fischer

These are some of the useful facts I might have learned at age eight, if I’d gone through that horsey phase. But I caught up on them last week while working on this story for ScienceNOW about Thoroughbreds’ ancestry.

Thoroughbred ancestry on the male side is recorded right back to the start of the breed, around 1700. But, in the beginning, nobody thought the females mattered, so they didn’t keep records. It was kind of generally known that the founding females were native Irish and English horses, but in the early 20th century some horsey people got all worked up about how their founding mothers must have been Arabians like their founding fathers. This study settles the question. (Probably. For now.)

photo: someone on Wikipedia

Photo: Heather Huson

In the course of all this breeding, the team has been working on mapping genes for different traits – including the four-leaf trait. This turned out to be really tricky. So, there’s a gene for four leaves. But just because a plant has a gene doesn’t mean it’s always turned on. (You have a ton of genes for making digestive enzymes. The cells that line your small intestines turn these genes on, but you should be pretty grateful that the cells that line your eyeball don’t.) The four-leaf trait comes and goes depending on the season, for example. It’s also recessive. If you want to map it, you need a grad student who’s willing to spend a few years crawling around on her hands and knees counting leaves.

I wrote about that grad student, and the four-leaf gene, for the July 9 issue of Science magazine – but you have to have a subscription to read my story. (Or if you e-mail me and ask nicely, I’ll send it to you.)

Photo: came with the press release. I can’t find a credit for it.

People have known for a long time that stress is bad for you. Having good social support isn’t just, you know, the reason to live, it’s also good for your health. The guy who did this study worked out a link in the biological chain between stress and death.

The molecule he was looking at is called a transcription factor. A transcription factor is a little protein that grabs onto a strand of DNA near a gene and says, “Hey, transcribe this gene!” In this case, the transcription factor is activated by a stress hormone and turns on a gene that makes a protein involved in inflammation, part of the immune response. Inflammation is fantastic for, like, healing cuts, but we modern humans tend to turn it on and leave it on, which leads to heart disease and other nasty stuff.

So that’s what the story’s about. This was my first time writing for the Chronicle – my editor there is a former colleague from U.S. News & World Report, and it was fun to be reunited for this story.

At the very least, you should look at the great portrait they took of the scientist. He works at UCLA, but he happened to be on campus at Stanford (my first grad school alma mater) the week they needed to take a picture of him, so this is a picture of him with one of the many Rodins that litter campus. Anyone recognize the sculpture? It’s reasonably famous.

This is related to a shift in how people think about biology. For decades after DNA was discovered, everyone was really worked up about the genetic code, and how genes are a blueprint for everything. But the truth is, of course, much more complicated. Just because you have a gene doesn’t mean that it’s being expressed. It might be turned off entirely, or only weakly expressed, or only expressed in some cells and not others. Epigenetics is about looking at differences in how genes are expressed (turned into proteins).

You can understand the blog post even if that doesn’t make sense

Fun fact: They aren’t test tube babies, they’re actually petri dish babies.

Another fun fact: The picture with my story is of an egg being fertilized by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) (“icksee”). While in vitro fertilization was developed to get around female infertility, ICSI is for male infertility. As long as the guy is still making some sperm, you can fish them out and inject one right into the egg.

Aww, lookit the cute li’l monkey doing the test! He’s supposed to find the pink dots among the gray dots. If he gets it right he gets a drop of grape juice.

The monkeys in the study are squirrel monkeys. Isn’t that a cute name? It sounds tiny and adorable, and like it would enjoy hopping around in trees, which I think is a fairly accurate description of the species. So, guess what the German word for them is? Totenkopfaffen. Death’s-head monkey. Yipe.

Progress update: I actually wrote this story in German, rather than writing in English and translating. And it ran in TWO newspapers today. Woo. I’ve mostly written for Die Welt so far, but the science section also supplies stories for Welt am Sonntag (the Sunday edition)  and Berliner Morgenpost. 

Photo Credit: Neitz Laboratory

Usually when I read about some new genome sequence, I get a big “eh” feeling. As in, “eh, big string of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, who cares.” But this is a really cool disease, and super important economically, and it turns out the genome itself is interesting, too.

The organism that causes late blight has a ginormous genome, with a ton of repeating sequences of DNA. Those big repeaty areas include lots of copies of the nasty genes that help it attack plants, like genes that cause cell death and stuff. So maybe there’s some way that the bug is using those extra copies to overcome the plants’ defenses. Cool, huh?

Chad Nussbaum, the guy at the Broad Institute whose group did the sequencing, said this genome was really hard because of all the repeats – and it helped them figure out stuff they can use later. “Every genome teaches you something new,” he told me. “They’re all strange in their own little ways.”

Best thing I found while working on this story: PotatoPro, a news source for the potato processing industry with headlines like “Sultry Sally has re-launched its low fat potato chip with even less fat” and “Man dies after falling into potato harvester.”

An interesting point about this work is how old-school it is. They’re looking for genes, but not using super-newfangled proteomics or whatever techniques – instead, they look for them by doing lots of mating plants together and looking for crossovers, like I learned about in intro biology in approximately 1994. Ok, yeah, computers do all the calculations now. But if they were teaching it in intro biology in 1994, believe me, it was basic.

Then when they find the gene, they don’t put it into another plant with viruses or fancy-schmancy genetic transformations – they do it with breeding. Sure, they use molecular techniques to make sure they’re getting the right genes in the offspring (this speeds things wayyyy up). But basically it’s good, old-fashioned plant sex.

Neat, huh? Made me want to learn more about the world of rice research.