Genetics

A research team has sequenced the genome of Jonathan, a 194-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise, and reports that he carries unique gene variants in most aging pathways. The comparison is with two other…

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborators at four other institutions report that two DNA changes sitting outside the MECP2 gene, in the switches that set how much of it a cell…

Larger dogs and male dogs, both of them shorter-lived, also age faster by a chemical measure read off their DNA. Researchers at Arizona State University, working with the Dog Aging Project, report…

Bone fragments too small to identify by shape, from Denisova Cave and other sites in southern Siberia, carried the DNA of an extinct relative of cattle and yaks that has never been described. These…

In 2010, in a lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, a postdoctoral researcher named Cheng Sun was combing viral genomes for stretches of human DNA, and found some. Two copies of a human gene…

A group at the University of Oxford has published a way to map the contacts a disease risk variant makes with nearby genes, one copy of each chromosome at a time and down to single DNA letters. The…

Researchers at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, report that a gene called CCNB1IP1 switched on in the primate brain and grew steadily more active as the…

Mitochondria keep a small genome of their own, separate from the DNA in the cell's nucleus, and it accumulates mutations as an animal ages. Some version of that fact has sat inside the standard…

Researchers have mapped the human face as it forms, cell by cell, across embryonic weeks 6 to 11, describing 56 distinct cell states. The atlas appeared on September 24 in Nature Genetics. The…

A team at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and the Hopp Children's Cancer Center Heidelberg reports that a gene called KDM2B is required for growth in laboratory models of…

The airways clean themselves. A thin film of mucus catches the dust, smoke and bacteria that arrive with every breath, and millions of microscopic hairs, called cilia, beat in unison to sweep that…

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, including Nobel laureate Jennifer A. Doudna, report the discovery of a family of RNA-guided systems that they place ancestral to the earliest…