Springer Nature

With their delicate, trumpet shaped flowers that open to greet the rising sun, the morning glory has long been a horticultural favourite. Unfortunately, the quick growth and hardy nature of these plants has made them a noxious invasive weed in many parts of the world, with particularly damaging impacts on crop agriculture. Here, Dr Diego Alvarado Serrano, from the University of Michigan, discusses...

Southern right whales have had a rough few centuries, being brought to the brink of oblivion more than once by the whaling industry. Before that, climatic shifts likely played havoc with their coastal breeding grounds. What impact did these events have on their population genetics and connectivity? These are the questions being tackled by Dr Emma Carroll and Prof. Oscar Gaggiotti. Join them as the...

What makes a beetle red? Or metallic? Or striped? And why display such a diversity of colour patterns within one species? These are the questions being asked by Lynette Strickland, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Pre-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Join us as we discuss her recent research on the genetic and ecological basis o...

Europe's 102 million domestic cats were spread across the continent by the Roman Empire. At least, that was the consensus. However, new genetic, archaeological, and archaeozoological evidence suggests that our feline friends were present in Central Europe thousands of years earlier than previously thought. How did they get there? And what does this mean for our understanding of cat domestication?...

Related article: Improved diagnostics by exome sequencing following raw data reevaluation by clinical geneticists involved in the medical care of the individuals tested https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-018-0343-7

Aggression is an evolutionary behavior seen throughout the animal world. When it comes to humans, however, some forms of aggression can be seen as pathological, dangerous, and quite costly to society. And yet there's a dearth of approved, effective treatments for aggression. Meghan Flanigan is a graduate student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and one of the authors of a new article...

In this episode we explore a hybrid approach for genotyping one of the most variable parts of the vertebrate genome: the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). Join Dr Silvia Fuselli (University of Ferrara) and Dr Rodrigo Baptista (University of Georgia) as they explain their work combining the best aspects of both next and third generation sequencing platforms—an approach that is bringing us eve...

Telemedicine is estimated to be used in 25% of patient-doctor interactions. It has benefits, including patient's not having to travel and being seen by healthcare professionals when community clinics are closed. But it is considered a high-stress clinical activity and involves decision making under conditions of uncertainty and urgency. In this episode, we speak to Motti Haimi, a Pediatrician and...

Related article: Frequency and signature of somatic variants in 1461 human brain exomes https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-018-0274-3

Misattributed parentage as an unanticipated finding during exome/genome sequencing: current clinical laboratory practices and an opportunity for standardization Related article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-018-0265-4

PhD candidate Shannon Kjeldsen, from James Cook University, discusses the ecology, history, population genomics and conservation of an iconic Australian species: the koala! Exciting things are also happening at Heredity Podcast HQ—the way we bring you the latest and greatest genetics research is about to get a whole lot better! Related article: Genomic comparisons reveal biogeographic and anthropo...

This episode is a celebration of the Heredity Special Issue: Evolutionary Consequences of Epigenetic Inheritance. Join us as we talk about the motivation behind the Special Issue with Editor Dr Foteini Spagopoulou. Then, PhD student Erin Macartney discusses the role of paternal epigenetic inheritance—a particular focus of the issue— and Dr Yuan-Ye Zhang explains her experiential work on the evolut...

The relationship between birth-weight and heart disease is well documented and is thought to arise from altered developmental trajectories leading to persistent deficits in organ structure and function. Most animal studies looking at the effects of adverse in utero environment have been studied in the context of fetal hypoxia. Less is known regarding the cardiac consequences of maternal malnutriti...

Related article: The New York pilot newborn screening program for lysosomal storage diseases: Report of the First 65,000 Infants https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-018-0129-y Paradigm shifts in newborn screening? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-018-0130-5

Related link: The impact of variant classification on the clinical management of hereditary cancer syndromes https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-018-0063-z

While the influence of sweet taste on neurocognitive function has been widely studied, umami or savory has received less of a research focus. Animal models and even some small human studies seem to show that umami given in a broth before a meal can influence appetite and food intake. And this inspired Dr. Miguel Alonso-Alonso, Assistant Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Bariatric and Nut...

This episode of the Heredity Podcast is all about applying new genetics methods to understudied organisms! Join us as we explore a novel metric for evolutionary and conservation genetics with salp expert Dr William Goodall-Copestake (British Antarctic Survey). Then stick around to hear Prof. Brad Shafer and Dr Evan McCartney-Melstad (University of California, Los Angeles) discuss their recent appl...

During her PhD Maria Luisa Tataranno performed research into early biomarkers of brain development in preterm neonates. Now a fellow of neonatal neurology of the Wilhelmia Children's Hospital in Utrecht, the Netherlands, Maria and her team have published a paper into the associations between early brain activity and changes in brain morphology and microstructure. In this episode, Maria tells us ab...

Patients with sickle cell disease often experience severe pain as a result of vaso-occlusive episodes. Typically their pain is managed with opioids, however some patients experience continued and increasing pain, believed to be as a result of opioid-induced hyperalgesia or tolerance. Many patients go on to develop chronic pain which is thought to have a neuropathic component, for which opioids are...

Obesity has been shown to be linked with a host of physiological and psychological problems, such as cancer, diabetes and depression. In adults, obesity has also been shown to be related to decreased cognitive function and structural brain differences. The evidence for this effect on cognition is less well established in children and adolescents. In this episode we meet Dr. Stijn Vantieghem from t...

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common cause of chronic liver disease in the United States. It's all been steadily rising, along with rising obesity levels. Currently, early interventions for NAFLD include dietary, lifestyle counselling, and vitamin supplementation. Recent evidence suggests that the gut microbiota may be involved in the pathophysiology of non-alcoholic fatty...

In this month's episode of the Heredity Podcast we are all about the mouth! First, we discuss the genetics underlying molar teeth development and inhibition with French morphometrician Dr Nicolas Navarro. Following this, Brazilian researcher Dr Maria Marta Pastina explains all about an emerging plant breeding method called genomic selection, and how her team is using it to develop more drought tol...

TB was responsible for 1.8 million deaths in 2015, of which children account for almost 10%. A large proportion of TB patients go undetected in high burden countries due to the poor sensitivity of the smear microscopy used to detect the disease. Paediatric cases are often harder to detect because children produce lower quality sputum samples needed for the smear microscopy. As a result, many child...

NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale: 1-month normative data and variation from birth to 1 month Livio Provenzi is based at the Scientific Institute IRCCS Eugenio Medea in Italy, where he is involved in the Preterm Behavioral Epigenetics Project, a longitudinal research project in very pre-term infants looking at the long and short-term epigenetic and behavioral effects of painful and invasive proce...

This month's GenePod focuses on new, extensive data of intragenic deletion/duplication analysis in over 143,000 individuals. Such data are helping to sort out innocent del/dups from those causative of disease and reinforce the need to perform such analysis as part of genomic testing to determine disease etiology. Related articles: Prevalence and properties of intragenic copy-number variation in Me...