Third cousin couples have the most children and grandchildren

Marriage between closely related cousins is a heavy taboo in many cultures and its critics often cite the higher risk of genetic diseases associated with inbreeding. That risk is certainly apparent for very close relatives, but a new study from Iceland shows that very distant relatives don’t have it easy either. In the long run, they have just as few children and grandchildren as closely related ones.

Shuffling the genetic deck

Sex chromosomes aside, every person has two copies of each gene, one inherited from their father and one by their mother. Not every gene will be in correct working order, but there’s a good chance that a faulty copy will be offset by a functional one from the other parent.

However, if two parents are closely related, there’s a higher-than-average chance that they will already share some of the same genes and a similarly increased chance that their child will receive two defective copies. That can be very bad news indeed and in cases where important genes are affected, the results can include miscarriage, birth defects or early death.

Sex, then, is a shuffling of their genetic deck and theoretically the more closely related the partners are, the greater the chance that their child will be dealt a dud hand. And yet, some studies have found that some closely related couples actually do better than distant relatives in terms of the number of children they manage to raise. This trend is certainly unexpected and the big question is whether it is the result of biology or money.

Editing Ebola – how to tame one of the world’s deadliest viruses

In a list of the most dangerous jobs in the world, ‘Ebola researcher’ must surely rank near the top. But if new research is anything to go by, it may soon fall several places. An international team of scientists have recently found a way to neuter the virus, making it easy to study without risking your life. The altered virus looks like Ebola and behaves like Ebola, but it can’t kill like Ebola. It should make studying the virus easier and most importantly, safer.

The Ebolaviruses and their cousins, the closely related Marburg family, have a chilling and deserved reputation. In some outbreaks, 90% of those infected die from massive blood loss. There is no approved antiviral treatment. There is no vaccine. And given that it’s almost a rite du passage for infectious disease scientists to contract the contagion they study, working with Ebola is a delicate affair.

Maximum protection

Ebola research requires the highest level of safety possible – the “Biosafety Level-4” laboratory. The stand-alone facilities are designed to be easily sealed and impervious to animals and insects. All routes in and out, including all pipes and ventilation, are peppered with multiple airlocks, showers and rooms designed to prevent any chance of escaping viruses.

There are very few people who are qualified to work in such a prohibitive environment and those that do have to wear a Hazmat suit at all times and breathe from a self-contained oxygen supply. No wonder then that the majority of Ebola research doesn’t actually use live, infectious viruses.

Scientists must instead settle with isolated proteins, proteins shoved into other, less harmful viruses or even “virus-like particles”. But these artificial systems are different to the virus proper, and using them is like staring at a complex machine through a cobweb-covered keyhole. Peter Halfmann from the University of Wisconsin has found a way around this, opening the door for scientists to get a proper look at the virus.

Evolutionary arms race turns ants into babysitters for Alcon blue butterflies

In the meadows of Europe, colonies of industrious team-workers are being manipulated by a master slacker. The layabout in question is the Alcon blue butterfly (Maculinea alcon) a large and beautiful summer visitor and its victims are two species of red ants, Myrmica rubra and Myrmica ruginodis.

The Alcon blue is a ‘brood parasite’ – the insect world’s equivalent of the cuckoo. David Nash and European colleagues found that its caterpillars are coated in chemicals that smell very similar to those used by the two species it uses as hosts. To ants, these chemicals are badges of identity and so similar are the caterpillars that the ants adopt them and raise them as their own. The more exacting the caterpillar’s chemicals, the higher its chances of being adopted.

The alien larvae are bad news for the colony, for the ants fawn over them at the expense of their own young, which risk starvation. If a small nest takes in even a few caterpillars, it has more than a 50% chance of having no brood of its own. That puts pressure on the ants to fight back and Nash realised that the two species provide a marvellous case study for studying evolutionary arms races (which I’ve blogged about before here).

Theory predicts that if the parasites are common enough, they should be caught in an ongoing battle with their host, evolving to become more sophisticated mimics, while the ants evolve to become more discriminating carers. The two species make a particularly good model for this because their geographical ranges overlap in a fractured mosaic.

Mud time capsules show evolutionary arms race between host and parasite

Evolution can sometimes be seen as a futile contest. Throughout the natural world, pairs of species are locked in an evolutionary arms race where both competitors must continuously evolve new adaptations just to avoid ceding ground. Any advantage is temporary as every adaptive move from a predator or parasite is quickly neutralised by a counter-move from its prey or host. Coerced onward by the indifferent force of natural selection, neither side can withdraw from the stalemate.

These patterns of evolution are known as Red Queen dynamics, after the character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass who said to Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

These arms races are predicted by evolutionary theory, not least as an explanation for sex. By shuffling genes from a mother and father, sex acts as a crucible for genetic diversity, providing a species with the raw material for adapting to its parasites and keep up with the arms race.

Watching the race

We can see the results of Red Queen dynamics in the bodies, genes and behaviours of the species around us but actually watching them at work is another matter altogether. You’d need to study interacting species over several generations and most biologists have neither the patience nor lifespan to do so.

But sometimes, players from generations past leave behind records of the moves they made. Ellen Decaestecker and colleagues from Leuven University found just such an archive in the mud of a Belgian lake.

Sickle cell mice cured by stem cells reprogrammed from their own tails

Stem cells have long been hyped as the shiny future of medicine. Their ability to produce to every type of cell in the body provided hope for treating diseases from Alzheimer’s, to Parkinson’s to stroke, by providing a ready supply of replacement cells. Despite years of slow progress, we are now tantalisingly close to turning this hype into reality and a new study suggests that the dawn of promised stem cell treatments is getting closer.

For the first time, scientists have cured mice of a genetic disorder called sickle cell anaemia using personalised stem cells reprogrammed from cells in their tails. The study is a powerful ‘proof-of-principle’ that reprogrammed stem cells could one day fulfil their potential in fighting human disease.

The personal touch is of the utmost importance. It’s no good just giving someone any old stem cells. Genetic differences between the donor and recipient could cause problems in the long-term and trigger attack and rejection from the hosts’ immune system in the short-term. The trick is to convert a patient’s own cells into personalised stem cells for their own private use.

Last year, a group of Japanese scientists found a way to do this in mice and produced “induced pluripotent stem cells” (iPSCs) that were very similar to embryonic stem cells. And just last month, I blogged about two breakthrough papers which showed that human cells could also be reprogrammed into iPSCs.

Now, Jacob Hanna and colleagues from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, the University of Alabama and MIT, have used these reprogrammed cells to cure a genetic disease – sickle cell anaemia.

MRSA gets piggyback from livestock to humans

I’ve written an article for the Economist about a new strain of the antibiotic-resistant “superbug” MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) that infects large numbers of farm pigs and can jump into humans.

The strain was first found in pig farms in the Netherlands and may be picking up new resistances from their porcine hosts because of the large amounts of antibiotics used to medicate livestock.

The piece is in the Science and Technology section of the November 29th issue of the Economist (out in the UK tomorrow) but you can already read it online. I’m pretty excited about this – it’s certainly the most prestigious magazine I’ve had the opportunity to write for.

Human skin cells reprogrammed into stem cells

Potential is a sad thing to lose. Have you ever thought that it would be great to return to your childhood, when your options seemed limitless and life hadn’t taken you down increasingly narrow corridors of possibility? Wouldn’t it be great to rewind the clock and have the choice to start over?

While that’s still the stuff of science-fiction, for some cells in your body it may soon be science fact. In one of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the year, two groups of scientists have found a way of turning adult human cells back into the stem cells of embryos.

Creating embryonic stem cells

Embryonic stem cells are the embodiment of potential. Armed with a trait called ‘pluripotency‘, they can give rise to every single type of cell and tissue in the body, renewing themselves indefinitely while their daughters take up the mantle of nerves, muscles, blood and more.

For years, stem cells have been touted as the Holy Grail of modern medicine. Within their membranes lies the potential to understand how we develop, test new drugs and most importantly, provide replacement cells to treat Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, spinal cord injuries, diabetes, stroke and more.

Cooperating bacteria are vulnerable to slackers

As a species, we hate cheaters. Just last month, I blogged about our innate desire to punish unfair play but it’s a sad fact that cheaters are universal. Any attempt to cooperate for a common good creates windows of opportunity for slackers. Even bacteria colonies have their own layabouts. Recently, two new studies have found that some bacteria reap the benefits of communal living while contributing nothing in return.

Bacteria may not strike you as expert co-operators but at high concentrations, they pull together to build microscopic ‘cities’ called biofilms, where millions of individuals live among a slimy framework that they themselves secrete. These communities provide protection from antibiotics, among other benefits, and they require cooperation to build.

This only happens once a colony reaches a certain size. One individual can’t build a biofilm on its own so it pays for a colony to be able to measure its own size. To do this, they use a method ‘quorum sensing’, where individuals send out signalling molecules in the presence of their own kind.

When another bacterium receives this signal, it sends out some of its own, so that once a population reaches a certain density, it sets off a chain reaction of communication that floods the area with chemical messages.

These messages provide orders that tell the bacteria to secrete a wide range of proteins and chemicals. Some are necessary for building biofilms, others allow them to infect hosts, others make their movements easier and yet others break down potential sources of food. They tell bacteria to start behaving cooperatively and also when it’s worth doing so.

Delay not deviance: brains of children with ADHD mature later than others

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is the most common developmental disorder in children, affecting anywhere between 3-5% of the world’s school-going population. As the name suggests, kids with ADHD are hyperactive and easily distracted; they are also forgetful and find it difficult to control their own impulses.

While some evidence has suggested that ADHD brains develop in fundamentally different ways to typical ones, other results have argued that they are just the result of a delay in the normal timetable for development.

Now, Philip Shaw, Judith Rapaport and others from the National Institute of Mental Health have found new evidence to support the second theory. When some parts of the brain stick to their normal timetable for development, while others lag behind, ADHD is the result.

The idea isn’t new; earlier studies have found that children with ADHD have similar brain activity to slightly younger children without the condition. Rapaport’s own group had previously found that the brain’s four lobes developed in very much the same way, regardless of whether children had ADHD or not.

But looking at the size of entire lobes is a blunt measure that, at best, provides a rough overview. To get an sharper picture, they used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brains of 447 children of different ages, often at more than one point in time.

Metabolic gene and breastfeeding unite to boost a child’s IQ

The nature-nurture debate is one of the most famous in biology, but its own nature has shifted substantially in recent years. We now know that genes and environment are not opposing agents that shape our lives separately, but partners walking hand-in-hand. More often than not, genes affect our bodies and behaviour by altering the ways in which we react to our environment.

Now, an international team of researchers have discovered a stark example of this gene-environment partnership. They found that breastfed children have higher IQ scores, but only if they have a certain version of a gene called FADS2.

The concept of IQ has been central to the nature-nurture debate for years, ever since studies in twins suggested that a large part of the variation in IQ scores could be explained through inherited genetic factors. Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt from King’s College London wanted to kill this tiresome debate finding a gene that affected IQ via the environment.

They chose to look at breastfeeding, as studies have mostly found that babies who drink their mothers’ milk have higher IQ scores, among other benefits. These higher scores persist into adulthood and across social classes. We also have a reasonable idea of how breastfeeding could affect brain development at a molecular level, and it involves fatty acids.

Doctors repress their responses to their patients’ pain

A new study shows that experienced doctors learn to control the part of their brain that allows them to empathise with a patient’s pain, and switch on another area that allows them to control their emotions.

Many patients would like their doctors to be more sensitive to their needs. That may be a reasonable request but at a neurological level, we should be glad of a certain amount of detachment.

Humans are programmed, quite literally, to feel each others’ pain. The neural circuit in our brains that registers pain also fires when we see someone else getting hurt; it’s why we automatically wince.

This empathy makes evolutionary sense – it teaches us to avoid potential dangers that our peers have helpfully pointed out to us. But it can be liability for people like doctors, who see pain on a daily basis and are sometimes forced to inflict it in order to help their patients.

Clearly, not all doctors are wincing wrecks, so they must develop some means of keeping this automatic response at bay. That’s exactly what Yawei Chang from Taipei City Hospital and Jean Decety from University of Chicago found when they compared the brains of 14 acupuncturists with at least 2 years of experience to control group of 14 people with none at all.

Space flight turns Salmonella into super-bug

Science fiction loves to play off the potential threat of threat of alien viruses. But a new study suggests that space travellers are much more likely to be threatened by germs from our own planet that become more virulent in space.

Warding off infections is a real priority for astronauts, especially if longer space missions to the Moon and Mars are to go ahead. People have a tendency to get sick in space and over half of the astronauts on the Apollo missions became ill during their trips or soon after their return to Earth.

Earlier research has shown that prolonged weightlessness weakens our immune systems by preventing key sets of genes from switching on. But that’s only part of the problem. A team of researchers from NASA, Arizona State University and 12 other institutions has shown that bacteria also react to zero-gravity conditions, by becoming more virulent, or able to cause disease.