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 ...

Karla Kaun receives funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Many people are ...

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 ...

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 ...

Multicellular cyanobacteria do something strikingly sophisticated with their DNA, toggling key genes on and off as day turns ...

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 ...

While eating healthy and exercising are important for maintaining a healthy weight, so are some non-modifiable factors such as genetics. Researchers from the University of Essex found 14 “skinny genes ...