Great-grandpa’s genes gone, effects stay

Removing anti-obesity DNA from a mouse lineage doesn’t stop descendants from staying thin

VANCOUVER — Great-grandfathers may impart more than engraved watches. A sugar-regulating gene that made a brief appearance in a lineage of mice but wasn’t passed on seems to have made animals up to four generations later resistant to obesity, research presented March 30 at the annual conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology shows.