Annual Review of Genetics articles from January 1 1998

Annual Review of Genetics archives from January 1 1998

Alfred D. Hershey.(geneticist)(Obituary)
January 1, 1998... Alfred Day Hershey was born in Owosso, Michigan, in 1908 and completed his formal university education through the PhD at Michigan State College. He held a faculty position in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at Washington...

The role of the FHIT/FRA3B locus in cancer.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Fragile sites are chromosome regions that reveal cytogenetically detectable gaps after exposure of cells to specific reagents; several heritable, rare fragile sites have been localized to unstable CGG repeats and another,...

Regulation of symbiotic root nodule development.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Symbiosis between leguminous plants and rhizobia, under conditions of nitrogen limitation, leads to the development of new plant organs, the [N.sub.2]-fixing nodules, that are usually formed on roots but also on stems in a...

Targeting and assembly of periplasmic and outer-membrane proteins in Escherichia coli.
January 1, 1998... All cells sequester biological activities in subcellular compartments that are bound by lipid bilayers. Through this type of compartmentalization, cells enhance the functions of many activities by concentrating them, and they avoid such...

The genetics of breast cancer susceptibility.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Approximately one in ten women in the Western world develops breast cancer. The initial indication that a component of breast cancer may be due to genetic susceptibility originated from anecdotal clinical reports of...

Nonsegmented negative-strand RNA viruses: genetics and manipulation of viral genomes.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Negative-strand RNA viruses (NSV) are enveloped viruses of hosts from throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms. They differ widely in morphology and host interactions, and have varied genome structures. There are...

The genetics of disulfide bond metabolism.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Disulfide bonds play a number of different roles in protein structure and activity. For many proteins, disulfide bonds are permanent features of the final folded product. The formation of these bonds may be essential steps...

Comparative DNA analysis across diverse genomes.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Molecular sequence data are accumulating at an unprecedented pace. Dozens of complete genomes, tens of thousands of proteins, and several hundred nonredundant protein structures are now available. The coming phase of...

The ethylene gas signal transduction pathway: a molecular perspective.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION The development and survival of all living things relies on the ability of organisms to perceive and respond to their environment. Responses to internal and external signals are frequently elicited by hormones, promoting...

Molecular mechanisms of bacteriocin evolution.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION What Are Bacteriocins? Producing antimicrobial compounds seems to be a generic phenomenon for most, if not all, bacteria. Antimicrobials include toxins, bacteriolytic enzymes, bacteriophages, by-products of primary...

Alternative splicing of pre-mRNA: developmental consequences and mechanisms of regulation.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Alternative splicing is used to enhance the information contained within a gene and to control its expression. It is frequent in metazoans as diverse as the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the fruitfly Drosophila...

Kinetochores and the checkpoint mechanism that monitors for defects in the chromosome segregation machinery.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Mitosis: Chromosome Segregation and the Cell Cycle Machinery Proper chromosome segregation during mitosis is a complicated process that requires the faithful execution of several events (125, 133). For example,...

The diverse and dynamic structure of bacterial genomes.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION One might consider that a full understanding of the genetic structure of a species' genome is achieved when the complete nucleotide sequence of the genome of a member of that species is known. Such an assumption would likely...

Recombination and recombination-dependent DNA replication in bacteriophage T4.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY Genetic recombination between homologous DNA, "homologous" or "general" recombination, is ubiquitous among living things; its roles in repair of damaged DNA confer selective advantage to all organisms. General...

Natural selection at major histocompatibility complex loci of vertebrates.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) of vertebrates is a multigene family whose products are cell-surface glycoproteins that play a key role in the immune system by presenting peptides to T cells (32). The MHC family...

Evolution and mechanism of translation in chloroplasts.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Chloroplasts are plant organelles that contain the entire machinery for the process of photosynthesis. In addition, chloroplasts possess their own genome, multiple copies of circular double-stranded DNA molecules, typically...

Alzheimer's disease: genetic studies and transgenic models.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION With the changing demographics of society worldwide (141), disorders that affect the elderly are increasingly prevalent. In this age group, impairments in cognition and memory processes are common (114, 174), with the most...

The critical role of chromosome translocations in human leukemias.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION To appreciate fully the present excitement generated by our increasing understanding of the role of chromosomal abnormalities in human cancer, one has to understand the development of cytogenetics, particularly its...

Early patterning of the C. elegans embryo.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Over the past two decades, the early embryo of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been the focus of extensive genetic analysis, with the goal of understanding pattern formation and cell-fate specification. The unique...

Genetic counseling: clinical and ethical challenges.
January 1, 1998... Until recently, genetic counseling focused primarily on congenital and early-onset disorders, often with chromosomal or single-gene etiology. Advances in the genetics of complex and late-onset disorders have demonstrated the need for genetic...

Mating-type gene switching in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, mating type is determined by two different alleles of the mating-type (MAT) locus. Like many other fungi, budding yeast has acquired the capacity to change some cells in a colony from one haploid...

Epitope tagging.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Epitope tagging, first described by Munro & Pelham in 1984 (68), is a recombinant DNA method for making a gene product immunoreactive to an already existing antibody. The process typically involves inserting a polynucleotide...

The leptotene-zygotene transition of meiosis.
January 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Sexually reproducing organisms produce gametes that have half the normal cellular chromosome complement; in consequence, union of male and female gametes restores the normal cellular chromosome complement rather than...