what's your favourite gene?

Mine used to be 'Sonic hedgehog' and then it was 'Lunatic fringe' for a while and now i hate all genes.

DUDE!!! mine IS Sonic Hedgehog!!! i thought they were kidding the first time i read/heard about that gene!

Guess it would be Sonic... who say scientist can't be creative :D

certainly not me!!! :D

i also like 'decapentaplegic'

when learning embryology, i would call bride of sevenless: bride of frankenstein. for no particular reason.

i'll have to think about my favorite though

it's way too hard to pick a favorite. i'll have to give a nod to thor and gustavus obviously. since lotr is one of my favorite books, smaug is another favorite. i'm amazed they actually named a gene after the long island expressway (yay new york!). decapentaplegic is fun to say but mothers against decapentaplegic is even better.

sonic hedgehog is a gene? I learned it as some neuro anatomy thing. though i don't recall the details.

no, it is indeed a gene.. responsible for cell growth in developing fetal limbs ..

Originally posted by pumpkinsaren'torange
no, it is indeed a gene.. responsible for cell growth in developing fetal limbs ..

yes and no...it is involved in the development of every organ with a myriad of different functions.

the original hedgehog gene was probably the drosophila homologue. They only have one hedgehog gene. In vertebrates there are at least three:

sonic hedgehog
indian hedgehog
desert hedgehog


usually they go for the boring hedgehog 1, 2, 3, but in this case the person that named sonci hedgehog was probably a fan of videogames, or one of his children. Not sure why he named it like this exactly.

hedgehog is one of those signalling molecules. A protein that is produced by one cell. Then it ends up outside the cell and diffuses away from the cell. It then binds to a receptor on another cell which activates the receptor. Then an intracellular signalling cascade is activated inside the cell turning on or off other genes.
As you can imagine this is an important process in which new spatial information can be created in a tissue or organ.

Originally posted by spuriousmonkey
i also like 'decapentaplegic'

they even have 'mothers against decapentaplegic'

'swiss cheese'
Mutant flies' brains have swiss-cheese-like holes.

Lets have a gene called "Yo mama so fat..." http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/images/smilies/rofl.gif

My favorite gene is fruitless, which is a Drosophila transcription factor that determines male mating behavior. It's a funny name because the mutation actually makes the fly, well... fruity. Males with the fruitless mutation indiscriminately perform mating behavior towards both female and male flies. An interesting (if technical) discussion of its role in fruit fly (triple pun!) sex determination appears at http://sdb.bio.purdue.edu/fly/dbzhnsky/frutles1.htm

I also think it's interesting because it is an example of a single mutation that determines very complex downstream behavior. Clearly it's activating a "pre-programmed" suite of behaviors. Interesting!

Well, back to studying for my cell bio test...

--mj

are retrotransposons genes?

Fafnir665,

Some encode for proteins... most don't there. Many are old viri.

aren't we wonderful researchers here in our beloved research institute. We are supposed to be a center of excellence and when I asked my colleague what the definition of a gene really is we both couldn't answer for sure. How intelligent we are.

But I know that Fetus loves textbooks, so we looked it up.

Apparently a gene has to encode either a protein or RNA product. Therefore if no 'messenger' is made it isn't a gene.

are we happy with a definition like that?

The definition I'm learning in school (studying molecular biology) is that a gene is that it's all DNA necessary to get a functional polypeptide. That includes not just the coding sequence, but also regulatory sequences. Sometimes a gene codes for several proteins at once, all under the control of a single regulatory region.

A good book chapter on this topic is at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?call=bv.View..ShowSection&rid=mcb.section.d1e31260

I'm not sure that's the best definition, though. Some structures in cells, like telomerases, signal recognition particles, ribosomes, spliceosomes, and heterogeneous ribonucleoproteins are complexes of polypeptides (often several ones) and RNA. The whole complex isn't functional without the RNA, because the RNA itself is doing something. For example, the catalysis site for polypeptide formation in a ribosome is made RNA, not amino acids. You can strip most of the protein off of a ribosome and it will continue to function, but RNAase kills it. Mutations in the regions coding for ribosomal RNA can affect ribosome activity. So I'd argue for expanding the definition of "gene" to include sequences that code for RNA other than messenger RNA.

I like gene "grd" stands for groundhog