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2001 Results
Penn Biologists Show How Chromosomes ‘Cheat’ for the Chance to Get Into an Egg

Penn Biologists Show How Chromosomes ‘Cheat’ for the Chance to Get Into an Egg

Each of your cells contains two copies of 23 chromosomes, one inherited from your father and one from your mother. Theoretically, when you create a gamete — a sperm or an egg —  each copy has a 50-50 shot at being passed on. But the reality isn’t so clearcut.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Penn’s Restoring Active Memory Project Adds Task and Patient Data to Publicly Available Human Brain Dataset

Penn’s Restoring Active Memory Project Adds Task and Patient Data to Publicly Available Human Brain Dataset

The Restoring Active Memory project run by the University of Pennsylvania has just released human intracranial brain recording and stimulation data for 102 new patients and a new spatial-navigation task developed by researchers at Columbia University.

Michele W. Berger

Connecting Homeless Populations With Health Care

Connecting Homeless Populations With Health Care

Homeless people are uniquely vulnerable, at risk of a variety of health problems, including chronic illness, hunger, pain, and infections. While resources exist to provide homeless populations with health insurance and care, those resources don’t always make their way to the people who need them.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Targeting enzyme in ‘normal’ cells may impede pancreatic cancer’s spread, Penn Vet team shows

Targeting enzyme in ‘normal’ cells may impede pancreatic cancer’s spread, Penn Vet team shows

Cancer of the pancreas is a deadly disease, with a median survival time of less than six months. Only one in 20 people with pancreatic cancer survives five years past the diagnosis. The reason is the cancer’s insidiousness; tumor cells hide deep inside the body, betraying no symptoms until late in the disease, when the cancer has almost invariably spread to other organs.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Penn Medicine: Blood Flow in the Developing Heart Guides Maturation of Heart Valves

Penn Medicine: Blood Flow in the Developing Heart Guides Maturation of Heart Valves

Congenital heart valve defects appear in 2 percent of all live births, making them the most common type of birth defect. While some of these defects have been linked to specific genetic mutations, the majority have no clearly definable genetic cause, suggesting that epigenetic factors – changes in gene expression versus an alteration in the genetic code -- play an important role.

Penn Study Links Mutations in Notch Gene to Role in B Cell Cancers

Penn Study Links Mutations in Notch Gene to Role in B Cell Cancers

Notch is one of the most frequently mutated genes in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common leukemia in adults in the United States. It is also often mutated in other common B cell tumors, such as mantle cell lymphoma. However, the role of Notch in these cancers has been uncertain.

Karen Kreeger

Penn Study Shows How Female Immune Cells Keep Their Second X Chromosome Shut Off

Penn Study Shows How Female Immune Cells Keep Their Second X Chromosome Shut Off

Autoimmune diseases tend to strike women more than men and having multiple X chromosomes could be the main reason why. While a process called X chromosome inactivation serves to balance out gene dosage between males and females, some genes on the “inactive X” chromosome in immune cells can sometimes escape this process, giving women an extra dose of immunity-related gene expression.

Katherine Unger Baillie