Take a puff of nicotine for the first time, and your DNA plays an important role, alongside social and environmental factors, in shaping what happens next. In recent years, scientists have identified ...

Most genes are ancient and shared across species. But a small subset of genes are relative newcomers, spontaneously emerging from stretches of DNA that once encoded nothing at all. Now, after nearly a ...

Human Geneticist Dr. Neville Sanjana answers the internet’s burning questions about genetics and DNA. How are our genes related to our DNA? Does our DNA change during our lifetime? How do services ...

When a random worker honeybee is selected to become a queen, she is nothing special. But after dining on royal jelly, she doubles in size to become a queen capable of giving birth to a thousand bees ...

Thanks to increasingly efficient and affordable gene sequencing technologies, we can now chart our genetic blueprint in unprecedented detail. But what does each gene do? Of the roughly 20,000 genes ...

University of Chicago scientists have discovered a new wrinkle in our understanding of how our genes work. The team, led by Chuan He, the UChicago John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor of ...

Genome-wide association studies and rare-variant burden tests are the two main tools for discovering links between genetic variants and traits. Comparisons of their results reveal that they ...

The lab of developmental biologist Dr. Eric Lai has been studying evolutionary battles of the sexes in fruit flies. This colorful snapshot, courtesy of the Lai Lab, depicts sperm maturation in fruit ...

Almost 20 years following the completion of the Human Genome Project — a historic scientific achievement that resulted in generating the first sequence of the human genome — gene therapy is no longer ...

When a baby takes their first step unaided, it is a big moment for parents and their baby. After all, it symbolises a new phase in a child’s life. They officially, and literally, become a ‘toddler.’ ...

Most genes are ancient and shared across species. But a small subset of genes are relative newcomers, spontaneously emerging from stretches of DNA that once encoded nothing at all. Now, after nearly a ...