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User: Walkiry

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  1. Re:Don't need genetically altered food on The Oldest Mouse Contest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >>The problem is political instability

    And one way GM foods can help solve that is by allowing crops to grow in less favourable conditions. All that instability is, at the end of the day, just a hinderance to distribution. If we can make it easier to better grow crops locally, so much the better.

    Also GM food can help in some other ways. You might have heard about the Golden Rice, a variety of rice that contains a high amount of A-vitamin and could be a great help to prevent its deficiency (which is quite a bit of a problem in many areas of Africa and South-East Asia).

    We might not need it per se, but it sure is a nifty and useful tool to more easily solve certain problems.

  2. Re:Energy in/Energy out. on Power Plant Fueled By Nut Shells · · Score: 1

    Wow, I have to go there sometime. I actually HAVE opened Macadamia Nuts with a regular nutcracker. Although these were brazilian ones, maybe the ones in Hawaii are harder :D

  3. Re:SBC's ad is even better on SBC Refuses To Name File-Sharing Users · · Score: 1

    >>Ouch. That might come back to haunt them. Not really, there are dozens of artists who are putting their music for free on their websites so that you can try it out. All SBC has to do is come to /. do a search and get a few links.

  4. Re:Unfortunately, it's not so simple on Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo · · Score: 1

    Still, most genes that encode for the electron transport proteins are in the nucleus. I'll have to google now for those avian mitochondria if there is actually some evidence for them being less radical-prone, you woke my curiosity now :P

  5. Unfortunately, it's not so simple on Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo · · Score: 1

    Most of the proteins found in mitochondria are actually encoded in the nucleus, the mitochondrial DNA carries a very small portion of the necessary genes for its metabolism. You have also to consider the possibility that the reason for the reduced free radicals in birds could be because of the peroxysome (the structure that is in charge of eliminating free radicals) and not the mitochondrion itself.

  6. Re:The No. 1 Reason... on Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If the mitochondrial DNA (ie, the building blocks of the mitochondria) are from a rabbit, then would not, theoretically, the person in question have the metabolism of a rabbit?

    Most mitochondrial protein genes are actually in the nucleus. There are only a few "house keeping" genes and the DNA for tRNAs in the mitochondrion, and chances are these would probably work to some extent with the human proteins.

    is a human shaped / sized organism with a metabolism designed for a rabbit sized organism.

    At the mitochondria level the metabolism is pretty much the same (mitochondria do one thing that is important, creating ATP from NADH and FADH2 via the electron transport, which is pretty much the same in every organism, as well as most of their metabolism), it's the whole interaction of the organism (via hormones, nervous system and cell-cell interactions) what differentiates the metabolism of different organisms, and for that the genes present in the nucleus far outweight the importance of mitochondrial genes.

  7. Possible answer on Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    To this question from the article: Some wondered aloud what, exactly, such a creature would be if it were transferred to a womb to develop to term.

    Out of curiosity I went to the NCBI webpage to check both the rabbit and human Mitochondrial DNA. As you can see, the same genes are present in both organisms. This is not always the case, as different species have the mitochondrial genes split between the mitochondrion and the nucleus in different shares.

    If you then bother to run blastn with both sequences (or even better, tblastx) you can see the similarities between coding regions are around 75% or more.

    The more important a gene is in an organism, the less likely it will mutate over generations (and thus the less different it'll be between different species). Mitochondrial genes are quite important, so the rabbit mitochondria might work very well with a human nucleus.

    Bottom line? If those cells can actually grow to become a fetus, chances are that fetus won't really be much different from any other human fetus. It's more likely to fail its development because of how crude our clonin technology is at this point than because of the genetic differences.