Function
Btn1a1 regulates the amount of lipids and size of droplets expressed in milk. When the gene is compromised in laboratory mice, approximately half the pups died within the first 20 days and the remainder were significantly under-weight.
Read more about this topic: Butyrophilin, Subfamily 1, Member A1
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“Uses are always much broader than functions, and usually far less contentious. The word function carries overtones of purpose and propriety, of concern with why something was developed rather than with how it has actually been found useful. The function of automobiles is to transport people and objects, but they are used for a variety of other purposesas homes, offices, bedrooms, henhouses, jetties, breakwaters, even offensive weapons.”
—Frank Smith (b. 1928)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (18951985)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worryingas a reflex response to demandnever puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. Worrying and Its Discontents, in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)