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Many respiratory infections add significant stress to cells and organs, which can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which can cause death. "Novel therapeutic strategies to address ARDS, instead of fighting the infectious agent, could elicit the tolerance of the host organism towards the inflammatory challenge by boosting its natural adaptive stress responses," says Professor Johan Auwerx. Adrienne Mottis and her colleagues have shown that one such strategy can exploit a biological phenomenon known as "mitohormesis". Mitohormesis describes the fact that a mild stress to a cell's mitochondria can induce a series of responses that actually increase the cell's...

MtDNA exists separately from the rest of our DNA, inside the thousands of mitochondria within each cell, rather than the cell nucleus. It is so widely accepted as being from the mother's side it is sometimes known as the Eve Gene, the idea being that it can be traced back to some primeval mother of all living humans. Testing of mtDNA is used to identify maternal ancestry. However, all that will have to change after Dr Shiyu Luo of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. After testing of...

Previous analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. This was unexpected since their skeletal remains carry Neandertal-derived features. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have since worked on sequencing nuclear DNA from fossils from the cave, a challenging task as the extremely old DNA is degraded to very short fragments. The results now show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were indeed early Neandertals. Neandertals may have acquired different mitochondrial genomes...

New Genetic-Clock Research Challenges Millions of Years by Nathaniel T. Jeanson, Ph.D. * Does a 6,000-year-old earth match the findings of modern science? Secular scientists have answered forcefully in the negative for generations. However, their arguments rest on the assumption of constant natural processes and constant rates, and new discoveries from ICR’s geneticists present a strong challenge to these claims. Genetic “Clocks” Ticking within every species is a “clock” of sorts that measures the length of time that a species has existed on the earth. Since DNA is passed on imperfectly from parent to offspring, each generation grows more genetically...

I suspect many who will read this post already know who Justina Pelletier is. For those of you who do not, she is a 15-year-old girl from Connecticut who is trapped in Massachusetts. She was just ordered to a non-medical foster care facility by Judge Joseph Johnson on Monday. I'll try to fill in the back story as briefly as possible, but the details we know are important. Until just over a year ago, Justina Pelletier was living her life as a teenager in Connecticut. She loved to ice skate, if the pictures we have available are any clue. She...

The Aztecs who conquered the city of Xaltocan in ancient Mexico around 1435 may have fundamentally changed the genetic makeup of the people who lived there, new research suggests... Xaltocan was the capital of a pre-Aztec city-state ruled by the Otomi, an indigenous people who lived in Mexico. The period before the Aztec conquest was a tumultuous time for the Otomi, when a century of warfare led to the collapse of their capital city. Colonial records from the 1500s onward told tales of the Otomi fleeing the city en masse in 1395. Those records suggested that the city was abandoned...