Publications by authors named "Abbey Thompson"

Article Synopsis
  • Evolution creates many different types of living things, but some features appear over and over again in different species.
  • One example is stickleback fish losing their pelvic fins, which happens because of changes in a specific part of their DNA.
  • Researchers found that these changes in DNA are affected by how DNA is copied and can lead to mistakes that drive evolution in both sticklebacks and humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Vertebrate pelvic reduction is a classic example of repeated evolution. Recurrent loss of pelvic appendages in sticklebacks has previously been linked to natural mutations in a pelvic enhancer that maps upstream of . The sequence of this upstream enhancer is not conserved to mammals, so we have surveyed a large region surrounding the mouse gene for other possible hind limb control sequences.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genome wide association studies (GWAS) have mapped multiple independent cancer susceptibility loci to chr5p15.33. Here, we show that fine-mapping of pancreatic and testicular cancer GWAS within one of these loci (Region 2 in CLPTM1L) focuses the signal to nine highly correlated SNPs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of 10 different cancers have identified pleiotropic cancer predisposition loci across a region of chromosome 5p15.33 that includes the TERT and CLPTM1L genes. Of these, susceptibility alleles for pancreatic cancer have mapped to the CLPTM1L gene, thus prompting an investigation of the function of CLPTM1L in the pancreas.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The interaction of nuclear pore proteins (Nups) with active genes can promote their transcription. In yeast, some inducible genes interact with the nuclear pore complex both when active and for several generations after being repressed, a phenomenon called epigenetic transcriptional memory. This interaction promotes future reactivation and requires Nup100, a homologue of human Nup98.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Active genes in yeast can be targeted to the nuclear periphery through interaction of cis-acting "DNA zip codes" with the nuclear pore complex. We find that genes with identical zip codes cluster together. This clustering was specific; pairs of genes that were targeted to the nuclear periphery by different zip codes did not cluster together.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF