Why do humans have tails? An evolutionary geneticist’s curiosity about the case of a mouse with a coccyx injury
Unlike most monkeys, apes — including humans — and their close extinct relatives don’t have tails. Their coccyx, or tailbone, is a vestige of the vertebrae that constitute a tail in other animals. He planned to use his PhD to find the genetic basis for this trait. His coccyx injury, sustained during the cab ride, spurred his tail curiosity.
If the conclusion is largely the same, the extra experiments added more rigor to the study. Making all the mouse lines is a big undertaking, according to an evolutionary geneticist. I was sympathetic to the authors when I saw what they did.
The researchers were able to see how similar changes to the genome had short or absent tails. The work was published in Nature after 900 days because of the extra work needed to prove the effects of the genes on mice.
“Respect to the authors,” says Malte Spielmann, a human geneticist at Kiel University in Germany, who reviewed the paper for
Nature
. They have really pulled it off and I’m very excited about that.
Geneticist Bo Xia asked that question as a child and it was on his mind again a few years ago, while he was recovering from a tailbone injury during his PhD at New York University (NYU) in New York City.
Nature podcasts: Detecting the impact of reionisation on the cosmic past and uncovering the origin of the structures in the Universe
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To combat high cholesterol, many people take statins, but because these drugs have to be taken every day researchers have been searching for alternatives. Experiments in lab-grown cells show promise, however its effectiveness in animals is not clear. Now, researchers have shown the approach can work in mice, and have used it to silence a gene linked to high cholesterol for a year. The mice show markedly lowered cholesterol, a result the team hope could pave the way for epigenetic therapeutics for humans.
The Universe was filled with fog around 13 billion years ago and blocked some of the light from hitting it. This fog was lifted when the hydrogen was hit by radiation in a process known as reionisation, but the source of this radiation has been debated. The main driver for reionization is charged particles from dwarf galaxies and researchers believe that by using the JWST they can peer into the universe’s past. This finding could help researchers understand how some of the structures we now see in the Universe were formed.