Genetic Disorders and Birth Defects

General: The cause of holoprosencephaly is not fully understood. According to scientific studies, about 25-50% of all cases are associated with genetic abnormalities. Several other factors, including the use of certain medications during pregnancy,... Full Answer

While you can't control which genes you pass on to your child, you do have some influence over which genes are expressed, affecting what features are seen in your baby (his phenotype). In fact, how what you eat, breathe, and even feel can affect the... Full Answer

Genes are like recipes, they're instructions to build something. Both mom and dad contribute a copy of their entire recipe book to their offspring, but for many genes, only one copy of each recipe will be used by the baby. Mom and dad have exactly the... Full Answer

Through processes called methylation, you can alter the way the genes are expressed, as well as determine which genes are expressed. In other words, you can take certain actions that will decide whether some genes come to the forefront and whether others... Full Answer

The ability to turn genes on and off allows our bodies to react quickly to our environment. Learn more about this topic in this animation narrated by Dr. Oz. Full Answer

The word imprinting may sound like something you've heard on CSI, but it's actually a form of epigenetics. Even though two copies of a given gene are inherited, one from mom and one from dad, in certain circumstances, one is permanently turned off. The... Full Answer

Each cell in the human body contains about 2 meters of DNA that's packed into a tiny nucleus that's only about 5 micrometers in diameter. That's the rough equivalent of stuffing 2,000 miles of sewing thread into a space the size of a tennis ball. As with... Full Answer

One of the most miraculous processes in nature has to be how we grow from a single fertilized egg cell to the 10 trillion cells that make up a new person. Human cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes containing DNA. The chromosomes serve as the structure... Full Answer

The first scientific experiments with human embryonic stem cells were in 1998 when a group led by Dr. James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin developed a technique to isolate and grow the cells. It took until August 9, 2001 to acquire federal... Full Answer

In addition, epithelial stem cells in the lining of the digestive tract occur in deep crypts and give rise to several cell types: absorptive cells, goblet cells, paneth cells, and enteroendocrine cells. Skin stem cells occur in the basal layer of the... Full Answer