• Marte@lemmy.eco.br
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    18 hours ago

    A child student of mine, a die hard fan of Sonic the Hedgehog and also autistic, would be very excited to hear about this

  • blandfordforever@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Turns out that researchers get to name the proteins they discover and that the venn diagram of biochem researchers and nerds is just a circle.

    • bob_lemon@feddit.org
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      24 hours ago

      This one is actually a big of a tragic coincidence. A lot of genes are first discovered in a certain type of fruit fly (drosophilia melanogaster), which are excellent for this because of the low amount of gene redundancy and high reproduction rate.

      There’s a series of genes that cause the fruit fly to have little spikes in their body, making them look a bit like hedgehogs. One of those was jokingly called sonic.

      The problem is that this gene is present in humans, too, and has since been linked to severe brain deformities. As you can imagine, telling people that their child has a severe brain defect because of the sonic hedgehog gene is kind of problematic (Which is why it’s now commonly only called SHH).

      There seem to be newer naming conventions that should prevent this kind of issue in the future.

      There’s an episode of Let’s Learn Everything about this fruit fly: Episode 78

      • nylo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 hours ago

        idk I think it’s pretty pog personally but I can see the potential pain put upon parents presented with this perplexing appellation