#dna direction

[er-cryptid]

[loudlittleecho]

Danny Phantom Prompt: Too Late to Save Them

Ok! There are similar concepts floating either around here or AO3 (or both), but I haven’t been able to find this particular angst path. (Though I’m sure it’s around)

So!

Canon Divergence After TUE (The Ultimate Enemy)

Danny fought his evil self, but was too late to save his family. Clockwork didn’t reverse time to save them— they were always meant to die. It was their “time.”

-------------

“NO!” 

Danny was flown backward from the explosion, his body hurtling along with the rubble. 

The rubble. 

When the dust settled he heard sirens in the distance. Saw. . . a torn red beret beside his foot.

Tucker. 

Sam. 

His. . . 

Family. 

Distraught, confused, exhausted, Danny notices a woman crouched down beside him. She’s speaking to him, but he can’t hear her; there’s a dull buzz all around him, and the world seems more. . . narrow. It’s hard for him to focus on what he’s seeing. 

And then she. . . freezes. 

The world freezes in time. 

The ghost, Clockwork, is floating behind her. He has his hand out, waiting for something. His expression unreadable, but Danny understands. 

His fingers lightly grasp the thermos holding his future self. As though in a trance, he lifts it up to Clockwork. Gives him the thermos. 

Clockwork accepts it, continues looking at him impassively. 

Resumes time. 

. . . 

The days go by. He is released from the hospital in the care of a caseworker. She is talking to him gently, but he doesn’t hear what she’s saying. 

He's had many people talk to him, so many people gazing at him with pity. He can't be bothered to care.

He is led to a car, someone buckles him in. The car begins driving, and soon is parked in front of Fenton Works.

His home. 

The caseworker is saying something. . . Something about his aunt Alicia. He ignores her, walking into the house. 

Into the lab. 

He hears her scurrying after him.

Ignoring her cries of alarm, he goes into the portal. 

… 

He floats in the ghost zone. A few ghosts attempt to banter with him, push him around; but noticing his non reaction, leave him be. 

He can’t go home. Can’t go to Vlad. He has to keep his humanity to prevent becoming a monster. 

But how can he keep what he can’t feel?

He’s lost them all.

But he can keep his promise. 

“Don't worry. I won't turn into that. Ever. I promise.”

He floats further and further into the ghost zone. 

[ermuellert]

hard to come up with funny lil coping posts when all i can think about is how bayern has had so many seasons to prep for the impending transitional period where we have to reconstruct following the departures of a lot of our key core players and here we are at the end of thomas's second to last season and we are probably in the worst position we could be in ! great.

[kirinda-ondo]

It's always fun watching the fandom gather round to complain about the latest astro boy reboot news

It's like the semi-annual car crash, we gotta point and gawk

[coolcoolcoolbutwtf]

Teen Ben Omnitrix Au snippet

Teenager Omnitrix in the wild: learning how to function while being organic.

I've been thinking on and off about a fantastic fanfiction I read a while ago now which had Ben being the Omnitrix. Here

I have a very soft spot for those types of situations, you know? Playing around with questions regarding humanity and self views,my type of fun. So I thought "What if Ben looked a little older when he appeared from his dormant Omnitrix form?" And "What if he didn't know how to be human?"

"How would others view ben? How would it shape him?" Well this bad boy * slaps hood of this Au* was born from that question and others like it. *Evil laughter in the distance*

Teenager Omnitrix in the wild: learning how to function while being newly organic.

Chapter 1 sneak peek

Important Past lessons learnt from Gwen's teachings. Hygien. How did Ben learn it?

It started with an emergency shopping trip. They couldn't let the alien (genetically human) go without properly fitting clothes. Her uncle's ratty to big old clothes just wouldn't cut it. Plus The newly arrived and dubbed Ben would need stuff. Toothbrushes, hygiene products in general, clothes and proper shoes.

Gwen still didn't completely understand how or even why Ben would need to come along with them? Shouldn't they just call the authorities? Ben is still an alien, no matter how human he may look. Gwen is still probably the one that will need to tutor him on "how to human" or "pass for a human". She should probably start by explaining how to open the door.

"It says pull not push Ben!"

"Oh, sorry Gwen. I just don't understand why not all Terran establishments don't just have touchpads and auto opening entrances?"

She was going to need to teach him how to talk like a proper young dude. "Auto opening entrances" needs fixing as soon as she can scrabble together enough emergency movie DVDs, magazines and pop songs. She's going to make a proper teen out of him yet! Now where is the Wonder woman themed deodorant?

[pinkeoni]

It would fuck so hard if there were some direct homages to It Follows in season 5

[the-precious-sugar-chan]

today on: wtf is kino series [warning: kino's LE spoilers]

kino's LE manservant ending SUGGESTS that kino is a powerful ghoul, not a vampire. kino himself believes he's a a vampire but he's not. he presents himself as a vampire because that's what he thinks he is, but he's not.

at the end of his route he is supposed to be suitable for some kind of "surgery" made by the church to get his vampire powers and basically brainwash him as they did with richter- he agrees to get through it in his manservant end but it fails, and the bishop reveals that he's not a vampire, even though he's as powerful as one, therefore they can't proceed.

more specifically, it's said that the miasma of rotigenberg mixed and karl's dna (possibly from a hair) most likely merged together and created a "new immortal creature that shouldn't exist, like a ghoul" like he's not exactly a ghoul or a vampire. but something in the middle??

in addition, there are other LE routes where he gets killed and dies like ghouls do, dissolving or disintegrating.

...so yeah. it's odd that it's revealed only in one of his bad endings, but i think that's all we get aside from the subtle hints in other routes? he's most likely a ghoul with karl's powers, as he has his dna. and he might look like karl's 'real form' the most as well because of this.

[antirepurp]

at last i've gotten these kind of genes

very happy with the state of the power stat, with luck i could eliminate the A without even needing to upgrade it (it's not the visible gene for the chao so i can't do much about it) but the real challenge is going to be ensuring that the offspring of these two has at least one S in each stat as well. power is confirmed but with everything else it's a 50% chance per gene and a gross 6.25% across the board. if my math's correct. i haven't been very good at math for years so let's hope im wrong and the chance is higher hee hoo

here are the boys for your viewing pleasure: taichi, whose going to get rid of that sole D in run when he grows up

and casey who has the overall better DNA despite being stuck with a D afterwards

[beastking-golion]

funniest shit to me is that I had a nightmare sidestep wasn't actually a regene and was just someone mind controlled to think they were one, like damn I do NOT like that concept that badly

[lohstandfound]

time to apply Leah DNA's bonobo vs chimps rant to the bmc characters

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

it frustrates me that the writers did a similar thing with sandor as nine, where the version of them we see outside of their pov backstory novella is a completely different and significantly worse person, and that's the version the rest of their involvement in the series is built on while effectively missing a backstory.

like, sandor in last days of lorien and sandor in nine's legacy are both interesting characters in very different ways. but they are VERY different ways.

[canon-typical child abuse, dehumanization, torture, misogyny, transphobia mention, racism mention, there's a lot here lmao]

[deep breath]

NL!sandor is callous, dehumanizing, and cruel, and absolutely cannot grok that his child is not a belonging and extension of himself, to the point of being shocked when nine gets sick of being treated like a possession and starts really pushing back in a way he can't steamroll over because Hi I am a Fucking Person. he makes use of nine's inheritance to blow on cars and fancy suits and impressing girls, while completely and utterly isolating him and refusing to so much as give him time out of training to read about basic history or literature. when he finally starts half-assedly giving him a little bit of childhood it's because treating nine like a machine wasn't working anymore. he's a misogynistic piece of shit who uses that to emotionally abuse and insult nine and devalue his relationships with other people, while pressuring him to engage those relationships the way sandor would, and telling him that people he wants the respect of will think he's worthless, embarrassing, and a loser if he doesn't go through with it. he belittles nine's choices in presentation and appearance, in ways that are also misogynistic as well as transphobic and frankly pretty racist (hi, shitting on men with long hair). he treats him like a fictional character from comics he likes. it does not cross his mind even slightly to leave after they have LITERALLY BEEN FOUND BY A SCOUT WHO DID NOT REPORT BACK, because it would mean leaving behind his toys and he cares more about those than nine's safety. he guilts nine for supposedly being the one to take away his toys by escaping from the mogs sandor brought down on them, while doing something sandor pressured him relentlessly to do--the dating--and then disparages him for risking everything 'for some girl.' he gaslights him about being 'immature' and 'not thinking straight' when nine won't leave this time. he condemns nine to a year of torture, being forced to watch his girlfriend slaughtered in front of him, having to watch sandor be tortured in front of him, and having to mercy kill him to make it stop. he forces him to kill someone in what is clearly a horrifically traumatic incident, one that leaves him shaking uncontrollably and about to puke, and goes 'get used to it you fuckin pussy there's a war on' before moving right along. after said incident he gleefully beats him bruised and bloody on the regular, to the point where nine starts using his methods to self-harm later, and says 'you're no good to me' when he gets beaten up in the middle of training because he was preoccupied (thinking about the girl sandor pressured him into pursuing). he casually treats him like a servant. he makes him pick out knives to be thrown at him later. he calls his new legacy an upgrade.

like. there's more. there's more! the list is long! holy shit! he is interesting but jesus christ!

......and he is nothing like LDoL!sandor.

i could go on for a long time about this and in a followup i probably will, but like.

[deep breath the second]

LDoL!sandor would doubtlessly not be a great parent either, but it wouldn't be Like That. it would be single teen immigrant parent with zero support whatsoever, and no life experience with a place where there's scarcity and rough weather and shelter isn't always easy to come by and day-to-day life isn't relatively safe. it would be a very very adhd and autistic single teen parent who has never really learned how to cope with that outside specific social context and is very irresponsible because of it, and is also irresponsible as backlash against the authoritarian dystopia he grew up in. who is going to be fighting off the mother of all adhd/autistic burnout after a year and a half bottled up in a tiny space with a bunch of animals and SEVENTEEN OTHER PEOPLE, half of whom are small children, and more specifically has been left in charge of another very neurodivergent small child who is extremely loud and hyperactive and not good at grokking the idea of personal space. LDoL!sandor would be a parent who fiercely, desperately loves and wants the best for his kid, but is also a kid himself who is trapped in an absolute fucking nightmare scenario, and is desperately trying not to drown, and failing.

also a really interesting character! and a really goddamn heartbreaking one at that! and a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ONE from the sandor we got, whose arc and personality have the clearest knock-on effects on NL!nine's characterization, and then (to a lesser extent, for Reasons but that's a whole lot of posts of their own) canon!nine's throughout the series. and it's frustrating because if you try to use LDoL!sandor instead, it completely changes the fundamental themes of NL!nine's character and arc.

namely: pushing back against the idea that because you are a child you are an extension of me, not a person, and i own you. having both childhood and adulthood dangled over your head, to yank you around as a method of control by adults who were never going to treat you as a person either way. trying to become the latter for the agency to scrape together what you can of the former, and only having those last few scraps taken from you too in the process. infantilization vs adultification. That Kind of Thing.

(which, god that would have given him so many fantastic parallels and foils with five, but that is also something for another post or it will derail this train into the next state over. i could go on for So Long about this)

and! none of that would be a thing if he hadn't had the sandor for a guardian who treated him that way. aaaaaaa!!!

anyway there's a lot i could say about this but the long and short of it is that i am confident LDoL!sandor would beat NL!sandor to death with his own pasty little hands

[natureintheory]

Fragile DNA • 3D Science Illustration • Biology • 2019

Editorial illustration: broken glass DNA in 3D for a biology/evolution article on Quanta Magazine.

[precognitor]

Two's normally very smart and a genius biologist etc etc but since Lancer lacks lips and a tongue capable of forming proper syllables when he tries to talk while piloting him he just sounds like this.

[sorrowandpride]

I never understood Europeans bitching about (North) Americans and their obsession with ancestry until I read the comments on an archaeological article on Facebook 🥴 People will shove their ancestry DNA results down your throat when the conversation has absolutely nothing to do with it 😭

[jcmarchi]

Epigenomic analysis sheds light on risk factors for ALS

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/epigenomic-analysis-sheds-light-on-risk-factors-for-als/

Epigenomic analysis sheds light on risk factors for ALS

For most patients, it’s unknown exactly what causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease characterized by degeneration of motor neurons that impairs muscle control and eventually leads to death.

Studies have identified certain genes that confer a higher risk of the disease, but scientists believe there are many more genetic risk factors that have yet to be discovered. One reason why these drivers have been hard to find is that some are found in very few patients, making it hard to pick them out without a very large sample of patients. Additionally, some of the risk may be driven by epigenomic factors, rather than mutations in protein-coding genes.

Working with the Answer ALS consortium, a team of MIT researchers has analyzed epigenetic modifications — tags that determine which genes are turned on in a cell — in motor neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells from 380 ALS patients.

This analysis revealed a strong differential signal associated with a known subtype of ALS, and about 30 locations with modifications that appear to be linked to rates of disease progression in ALS patients. The findings may help scientists develop new treatments that are targeted to patients with certain genetic risk factors.

“If the root causes are different for all these different versions of the disease, the drugs will be very different and the signals in IPS cells will be very different,” says Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and the senior author of the study. “We may get to a point in a decade or so where we don’t even think of ALS as one disease, where there are drugs that are treating specific types of ALS that only work for one group of patients and not for another.”

MIT postdoc Stanislav Tsitkov is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications.

Finding risk factors

ALS is a rare disease that is estimated to affect about 30,000 people in the United States. One of the challenges in studying the disease is that while genetic variants are believed to account for about 50 percent of ALS risk (with environmental factors making up the rest), most of the variants that contribute to that risk have not been identified.

Similar to Alzheimer’s disease, there may be a large number of genetic variants that can confer risk, but each individual patient may carry only a small number of those. This makes it difficult to identify the risk factors unless scientists have a very large population of patients to analyze.

“Because we expect the disease to be heterogeneous, you need to have large numbers of patients before you can pick up on signals like this. To really be able to classify the subtypes of disease, we’re going to need to look at a lot of people,” Fraenkel says.

About 10 years ago, the Answer ALS consortium began to collect large numbers of patient samples, which could allow for larger-scale studies that might reveal some of the genetic drivers of the disease. From blood samples, researchers can create induced pluripotent stem cells and then induce them to differentiate into motor neurons, the cells most affected by ALS.

“We don’t think all ALS patients are going to be the same, just like all cancers are not the same. And the goal is being able to find drivers of the disease that could be therapeutic targets,” Fraenkel says.

In this study, Fraenkel and his colleagues wanted to see if patient-derived cells could offer any information about molecular differences that are relevant to ALS. They focused on epigenomic modifications, using a method called ATAC-seq to measure chromatin density across the genome of each cell. Chromatin is a complex of DNA and proteins that determines which genes are accessible to be transcribed by the cell, depending on how densely packed the chromatin is.

In data that were collected and analyzed over several years, the researchers did not find any global signal that clearly differentiated the 380 ALS patients in their study from 80 healthy control subjects. However, they did find a strong differential signal associated with a subtype of ALS, characterized by a genetic mutation in the C9orf72 gene.

Additionally, they identified about 30 regions that were associated with slower rates of disease progression in ALS patients. Many of these regions are located near genes related to the cellular inflammatory response; interestingly, several of the identified genes have also been implicated in other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease.

“You can use a small number of these epigenomic regions and look at the intensity of the signal there, and predict how quickly someone’s disease will progress. That really validates the hypothesis that the epigenomics can be used as a filter to better understand the contribution of the person’s genome,” Fraenkel says.

“By harnessing the very large number of participant samples and extensive data collected by the Answer ALS Consortium, these studies were able to rigorously test whether the observed changes might be artifacts related to the techniques of sample collection, storage, processing, and analysis, or truly reflective of important biology,” says Lyle Ostrow, an associate professor of neurology at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, who was not involved in the study. “They developed standard ways to control for these variables, to make sure the results can be accurately compared. Such studies are incredibly important for accelerating ALS therapy development, as they will enable data and samples collected from different studies to be analyzed together.”

Targeted drugs

The researchers now hope to further investigate these genomic regions and see how they might drive different aspects of ALS progression in different subsets of patients. This could help scientists develop drugs that might work in different groups of patients, and help them identify which patients should be chosen for clinical trials of those drugs, based on genetic or epigenetic markers.

Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a drug called tofersen, which can be used in ALS patients with a mutation in a gene called SOD1. This drug is very effective for those patients, who make up about 1 percent of the total population of people with ALS. Fraenkel’s hope is that more drugs can be developed for, and tested in, people with other genetic drivers of ALS.

“If you had a drug like tofersen that works for 1 percent of patients and you just gave it to a typical phase two clinical trial, you probably wouldn’t have anybody with that mutation in the trial, and it would’ve failed. And so that drug, which is a lifesaver for people, would never have gotten through,” Fraenkel says.

The MIT team is now using an approach called quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis to try to identify subgroups of ALS patients whose disease is driven by specific genomic variants.

“We can integrate the genomics, the transcriptomics, and the epigenomics, as a way to find subgroups of ALS patients who have distinct phenotypic signatures from other ALS patients and healthy controls,” Tsitkov says. “We have already found a few potential hits in that direction.”

The research was funded by the Answer ALS program, which is supported by the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins University, Travelers Insurance, ALS Finding a Cure Foundation, Stay Strong Vs. ALS, Answer ALS Foundation, Microsoft, Caterpillar Foundation, American Airlines, Team Gleason, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Fishman Family Foundation, Aviators Against ALS, AbbVie Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ALS Association, National Football League, F. Prime, M. Armstrong, Bruce Edwards Foundation, the Judith and Jean Pape Adams Charitable Foundation, Muscular Dystrophy Association, Les Turner ALS Foundation, PGA Tour, Gates Ventures, and Bari Lipp Foundation. This work was also supported, in part, by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the MIT-GSK Gertrude B. Elion Research Fellowship Program for Drug Discovery and Disease.

[florida3exclamationpoints]

John Hargrove is spilling so much tea in this book