Oct4 Gene Copies Pair Up In Mammalian Cells
Monday, March 9, 2015 - 09:05
in Biology & Nature
Imagine a pair of twins that everyone believed to be estranged who end up closer to each other than anyone knew. It may be just like that at the cellular level. We have two copies of each gene, one from each parent, and each copy, called an "allele," remains physically apart from the other in the cell nucleus. Except a new study finds that is not always the case - at least in one set of alleles in mammalian cells. And the pairing has been observed to coincide with a critical time in the life of a stem cell: the moment when it commits to develop into a specific cell type, called differentiation. read more