Posted on 09/22/2021 9:50:23 PM PDT by algore
Mammals from mice to monkeys have tails. But humans and our cousins the great apes lack them. Now, Researchers may have unearthed a simple genetic change that led to our abbreviated back end: an itinerant piece of DNA that leapt into a new chromosomal home and changed how great apes make a key developmental protein.
The finding also suggests the genetic shift came with a less visible and more dangerous effect: a higher risk of birth defects involving the developing spinal cord.
The work not only addresses an “inherently interesting question about what makes us human,” says Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, but also provides new insights into how such evolutionary changes can occur. “It’s beautiful work.”
In a gene called TBXT, he found a strong suspect, a short DNA insertion called an Alu element that was present in all great apes but missing in other primates.
TBXT codes for a protein called brachyury—Greek for “short tail,” because mutations in it can lead to mice with shorter tails. At first glance, however, the ape-specific Alu element did not seem to cause any significant disruption in the gene.
On closer inspection, however, Xia noticed a second Alu element lurking nearby. That element is present in monkeys as well as apes, but Xia realized that in apes the two Alus could stick together, forming a loop that would alter TBXT expression so the resulting protein would be a bit shorter than the original. That insight “was very clever,” Hoekstra says. “It wouldn’t have jumped out at me as an obvious mutation to test.”
Indeed, Xia and his colleague found that human embryonic stem cells make two versions of the TBXT messenger RNA (mRNA), one longer and one shorter. Mouse cells, on the other hand, only produce the longer transcript. The researchers then used the genome editor CRISPR to remove one or the other Alu element in human embryonic stem cells.
Losing either Alu element made the shorter version of the mRNA disappear.
birth defects such as spina bifida, where the spinal cord doesn’t close, and anencephaly are the cost for the loss of the tail, as we still feel the echoes,”
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Sounds like a new meaning for “chasing tail”.
You mean all those Playboy bunnies didn’t REALLY have tails?
Nonsense.
hmmm reminds me of a movie...about jumping
I always thought it would be really handy to have a tail..but it would have to be useful - sort of like a cat tail.
I wish I had become a university scientist so I could engage in wild speculation.
I still have a long, elegant tail.
Especially if it had venomous spikes on the end.
:D
Possibly not, but I did see some kind of homo-something that had one when I was watching the founding of CHAZ in seattle on a livestream.
one of my friends called me up at 1:30 in the morning and said “Al wake up and click on the live-stream I sent, you are not going to believe this S#it”
It was like the founding of a new dawn, as we focused on 6 people, one with a tail trying and failing to setup a pup tent as their new capitol on the hill, the Raz guy with his cheap AR was standing around trying to look cool.
If I had a tail, and someone pulled it, I think I would have to kill everyone in the room.
Judges 15:4
Then Samson went out and caught three hundred foxes. And he took torches, turned the foxes tail-to-tail, and fastened a torch between each pair of tails.
5. Then he lit the torches and released the foxes into the standing grain of the Philistines, burning up the piles of grain and the standing grain, as well as the vineyards and olive groves.…
Then I went out and got the mail, opened half of them, threw the other half away, then threw the ones I opened away. The Philistines were unimpressed.
there are gonna be an awful lot of people who think that they are monkeys in hell-
Or God may have created what you see, approximately 6k years ago, authenticated and proven by a resurrected Christ.
fascinating!
“I wish I had become a university scientist so I could engage in wild speculation.”
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And get paid for it!
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