Mutations in the ASPM gene are the most common cause of primary hereditary microcephaly in humans, a condition characterized by a severely reduced brain size. While ASPM has been studied in rodents ...

Autosomal recessive primary microcephaly (microcephaly primary hereditary, MCPH) is a genetically heterogeneous rare developmental disorder that is characterized by prenatal onset of abnormal brain ...

Humans have really big brains compared to a lot of animals. It’s sort of our thing. Scientists have presented various hypotheses about how humans developed these big brains — including one about our ...

The clinico-pathological and molecular heterogeneity of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) complicates its early diagnosis and successful treatment. Highly aneuploid tumours and the presence of ascitic ...

Bond J, et al. (2002) ASPM is a major determinant of cerebral cortical size. Nat Genet 32:316-320. Leal GF, et al. (2003) A novel locus for autosomal recessive primary microcephaly (MCPH6) maps to 13a ...

Ferrets have an outer brain layer that is large and folded – similar to that of humans. A new genetically engineered ferret has a smaller brain (right 3-D rendering) than a normal ferret (left) and ...

Two years ago, the Zika virus drew attention to microcephaly, a developmental disorder in which the brain and skull display inhibited growth. But there are other causes of microcephaly, such as ...

Aspm is back. The gene first came to prominence in 2005, in a paper in Science (a magazine I write for). One version of the gene seemed to show strong positive selection in humans—meaning it had ...

The birth of a human being requires billions of cell divisions to go from a fertilised egg to a baby. At each of these divisions, the genetic material of the mother cell duplicates itself to be ...

Ferrets have an outer brain layer that is large and folded – similar to that of humans. A new genetically engineered ferret has a smaller brain (right 3-D rendering) than a normal ferret (left) and ...