Scientists of a city-based premier eye institute and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, US claimed to have discovered potent stem cells in eye that possess the ability to restore lost vision.
“The new treatment could eventually become an alternative to corneal transplantation,” Dr Sayan Basu, Consultant Corneal Surgeon, LV Prasad Eye Institute, told reporters here.
The stromal stem cells were retrieved from the area between the white and black part of the eyeball called the limbus, he said.
The genes that teaches a song bird to sing are nearly identical to those involved in human speech?
Or that chickens and turkeys have experienced fewer gross genomic changes than other birds as they evolved from their dinosaur ancestor?
The most ambitious genetic study ever undertaken on bird evolution has found that almost all modern birds diversified after the dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago.
An international collaboration of scientists worked for four years to sequence, assemble and compare the full genomes of 48 bird species representing all major branches of modern birds including the crow, duck, falcon, parakeet, crane, ibis, woodpecker and eagle.
It is the largest whole genomic study across a single vertebrate class ever undertaken.
The study made connections they didn’t know existed before.
The work revealed how vocal “learning” of songs evolved in songbirds and shows that many of the genes involved in that learning are similar to humans.
“The popular view until now has been that the extraordinary diversity of birds began during the dinosaur age but we found little support for this,” said Simon Ho from the University of Sydney. He added “Our data helped solidify the surprising notion that parrots and songbirds are sister groups in the tree of life of birds, so their shared ability to learn songs — in the case of parrots, human speech sounds — likely had a common origin. In contrast, hummingbirds are separate, so their ability to learn songs — yes, hummingbirds sing and learn how to sing from their parents — arose separately in evolution,”
The Avian Phylogenomics Consortium involves more than 200 scientists hailing from 80 institutions in 20 countries, including the BGI, the University of Copenhagen, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Smithsonian Museum, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Louisiana State University and many others.
