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Lofty Thought of the Day
- Category: Science & Technology
By NICHOLAS WADE NYTimes.com - November 11, 2009 Illustration of the placement of genes in a chromosome. Of the 20,000 genes in the human genome, few are more fascinating than FOXP2, a gene that underlies the faculty of human speech. A gene can be defined as a region of DNA that controls a hereditary characteristic. It usually corresponds to a sequence used in the production of a specific protein or RNA.
A gene carries biological information in a form that must be copied and transmitted from each cell to all its progeny. This includes the entire functional unit: coding DNA sequences, non-coding regulatory DNA sequences, and introns.
Genes can be as short as 1000 base pairs or as long as several hundred thousand base pairs. It can even be carried by more than one chromosome.
All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human version’s product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak and chimps cannot.
FOXP2 came to light in a large London family, half of whose members have severe problems in articulating and understanding speech. All turned out to have a mutation that disrupted this vital gene.
This year, one inquiry bore fruit, although of a somewhat ambiguous nature, when biologists in Leipzig, Germany, genetically engineered a mouse with the human version of FOXP2 substituted for its own. The upgraded mice squeaked somewhat differently from plain mice and were born with subtle alterations in brain structure.
But mice and people are rather distant cousins — their last common ancestor lived some 70 million years ago — and the human version of FOXP2 evidently was not able to exert a transformative effect on the mouse.
A scientific team led by Dr. Daniel H. Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now completed a parallel experiment, which is to put the chimp version of FOXP2 into human neurons and see what happens. These were neurons living in laboratory glassware, not a human brain, so they gave a snapshot of FOXP2 only at the cellular level. But they confirmed suspicions that FOXP2 was a maestro of the genome.
The gene does not do a single thing but rather controls the activity of at least 116 other genes, Dr. Geschwind’s team says in the Thursday issue of Nature...MORE...
