Genetics

Breeding a variety that can withstand disease and taste better, too.

As arable land disappears, a genetic tweak might secure the world’s food supply.

DNA mutations are hard to fix. Scientists are trying another approach.

Genetic diseases that puzzle lab scientists are being solved by quantitative biologists.

Unusual proteins that can quickly fold into different shapes provide cells with a novel regulatory mechanism.

Mistletoes have all but shut down the powerhouses of their cells. Scientists are still trying to understand the plants’ unorthodox survival strategy.

Even genes essential for life can be caught in an evolutionary arms race that forces them to change or be replaced.

Imagine you’ve moved into a new neighborhood. You and your new neighbor, Jack, quickly build a friendly rapport and, after a couple weeks, you give him a set of keys, in case of emergency. One day, returning his hammer you borrowed, you see a young guy stumbling out of Jack’s front door, a laptop in […]

Researchers see structural changes in genetic material that allow memories to strengthen when remembered.

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of CRISPR/Cas9 genetic editing.

Hooking up is nature’s way for a species to overcome a bad genomic match.

The unintentional creation of “sturddlefish” hybrids may illuminate the genomic mechanisms that govern whether species can interbreed.

Jellyfish didn’t need novel genes to take an evolutionary leap in complexity.

Cosmic rays may have given right-handed genetic helixes an evolutionary edge at the beginning of life’s history.

The staple fish is having an identity crisis.

Tracing the path of a pandemic.

Uncovering the molecules that keep our mind and body in a daily rhythm.

Genetic engineering will bring us new Bolts and Shaqs.

Genes that can’t express themselves may be hallmarks of cancer.

For decades, scientists have been intrigued by tiny viruses whose genetic material can be read both forward and backward. New research begins to explain this puzzling property.

A pictorial map of the genes that unite all life.

Computational biology is exposing hidden patterns of evolution and disease in our DNA

Hope your week went well. It might have changed your genetics.

A short genetic history of one of the most profound dimensions of human identity.

We are not nearly as determined by our genes as once thought.

In the Netflix anime series Knights of Sidonia, humankind is marooned in a spaceship 500,000-strong, refugees constantly on the run from shapeshifting aliens who destroyed Earth over 1,000 years ago. Both the patriarchy and poverty have been smashed. Advances in genetic engineering have allowed androgynous individuals to proliferate and asexual reproduction to become commonplace. Everybody […]

Genes that can’t express themselves may be hallmarks of cancer.

With the help of deep learning techniques, paleoanthropologists find evidence of long-lost branches on the human family tree.

A new genetic technology that can quickly change entire populations gets broader.

Jellyfish didn’t need novel genes to take an evolutionary leap in complexity.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. An overarching theme in the story of evolution, at least over the past half billion years or so, is rising complexity. There are other themes, of course, but life has undoubtedly become more complicated since its origin. Early cells globbed together to form multicellular coalitions. Those developed more complex bodies and lifestyles as […]

We are not nearly as determined by our genes as once thought.

The availability of new genomes for 16 diverse strains of laboratory mice will help accelerate research into the genetic underpinnings of human traits and diseases.

How industrial agriculture stole sex from our most important fresh fruit crop.

A primer on the epigenome.

How remarkable, I thought, that science is fulfilling, in some sense, that ancient aspiration to decipher some measure of our personal nature and fate. In February, for my birthday, I was gifted a 23andMe genetic test kit. I enjoyed this coincidence: Here was a technology, contra astrology, that would have some real purchase, however limited, […]

The inventors of a “Swiss army knife” for genome editing received prestigious honors, as did pioneering scientists in astrophysics and neuroscience.

Three of the rare Przewalski’s horses that now roam the area near the Chernobyl nuclear plant.Photograph by Sergey Gaschak After a fatal series of errors and malfunctions in the early morning of April 26, 1986, the core of the Chernobyl nuclear facility melted down and then exploded, killing 31 workers at the plant. The accident […]

In the Netflix anime series Knights of Sidonia, humankind is marooned in a spaceship 500,000-strong, refugees constantly on the run from shapeshifting aliens who destroyed Earth over 1,000 years ago. Both the patriarchy and poverty have been smashed. Advances in genetic engineering have allowed androgynous individuals to proliferate and asexual reproduction to become commonplace. Everybody […]

To date the branches on the evolutionary tree of life, researchers are looking at horizontal gene transfers among ancient microorganisms, which once seemed only to muddle the record.

When genetic structure follows social structure.

What you pass on to your kids isn’t always in your genetic code.

The humanzee is both scientifically possible and morally defensible.

Educational attainment has some qualitatively unique features that we’re going to have to be sensitive to when we attempt to study the genetics of it.Photograph by Joey Yee / Flickr What if a wound of yours, a pierced ear, say, healed at a different rate depending on who was around you? A 2017 study explored […]

Hint—it’s mostly coincidence.

Mechanical tension between tethered cells cues developing tissues to fold. Researchers can now program synthetic tissue to make coils, cubes and rippling plates.

Anybody you can name from ancient history is in your family tree.

CRISPR’s not on the cusp of anything.Wikicommons How many diseases could humans treat if the DNA in troublesome cells could be edited within the body? Half? Most? How about “absolutely everything”? That was the answer Irina Conboy, a bioengineer at U.C. Berkeley, recently gave to New Scientist. Her optimism illustrates the promise, announced three years […]

Models show that evolving resistance won't stop aggressive standard gene drives from spreading.

  The so-called “year without a summer,” 1816, was bleak, if not strangely gothic. Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted the year before, pitching volcanic ash into the atmosphere and obscuring the sun. Torrential rains pressed deep into the year, resulting in global crop failures. The birds quieted down by midday, as darkness descended, and […]

The genetic stories of New York City rats and mice.

New techniques expose unexpected diversity within seemingly uniform tissues.

A 2008 nationally representative survey of U.S. high school biology teachers found that nearly half of the responders agreed or strongly agreed that creationism or intelligent design was “a valid, scientific alternative” to evolution.Image by José-Manuel Benitos / Wikicommons One of the latest victims of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian regime in Turkey isn’t a journalist, […]

Francisco Mojica in a lab at the University of Alicante in Spain.Photograph courtesy of the University of Alicante. When Francisco Mojica was 25, he supported himself by tracking bacteria in the Mediterranean off the coast of a tourist haven in southeastern Spain. At the time, he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Alicante, […]

Evidence is stacking up on both sides of an age-old debate.

The Princeton sociologist explains why race is not a scientific category.

Setting the scientific record straight on race, IQ, and success.

How the genome of a salt-loving microbe led to a world-changing technology.

Siddhartha Mukherjee has an arresting thought experiment: What if, along with your familiar elementary-school report card, you had a genetic report card—one that read out your propensity for getting each letter grade in each subject? If you get an A in math, and your genetic report card says that your propensity for getting that grade […]

This Yellowstone bacterium sparked PCR, one of the great advances in genetics.

Genetic mutation changes from adaptive to dangerous after reproductive age.

Each year, from 1913 to 1917, the psychologist Edmund S. Conklin would hand out a questionnaire to his new psychology students. Conklin wanted to see which superstitious habits or beliefs were the most and least enduring. He found that just over a quarter of college students believed in lucky four-leaf clovers, making it the second […]

The computational geneticist explains why she chose research over being a doctor.

I recently discovered that my 10-times-great-grandfather bought a good chunk of Brooklyn from the Lenape Indians. He was one of the first Dutch landowners on this continent, a man who had run a laundry bleaching business in Holland but had traveled under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company to become a farmer in […]

A short genetic history of one of the most profound dimensions of human identity.

This Yellowstone bacterium sparked PCR, one of the great advances in genetics.

The $325 billion biotech industry began with the discovery of an enzyme to slice DNA.

Almost exactly a year ago, I attended the International Summit of Human Gene Editing at the National Academy of Sciences. It was organized in part by Jennifer Doudna, arguably one of the inventors of Crispr-Cas9. It’s a new biotech tool—cheap, easy to use, and reliable—that allows thousands of scientists around the world to modify genes […]

One geneticist’s quest to de-extinct what was once one of the world’s most abundant birds.

The cell is equipped with multiple redundancies in case something goes wrong. Researchers have begun to map these systems.

A new look at the reasons why organisms missing pairs of genes sometimes do much better than normal.

What we can learn about evolution from species who thrive without sexual reproduction.

Genetic engineering will bring us new Bolts and Shaqs.

It sounds like science fiction: A citizenry genetically engineered to be democratic. It’s not implausible. Last month, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report touting the promise of a biological engineering technique called gene drive—particularly for dealing with public health problems such as the Zika virus, malaria, and dengue fever. Last year, Anthony James, […]

A few years ago, molecular biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, along with a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were the first to file a patent for CRISPR-Cas9. It’s a DNA-editing technology adapted from the prokaryote immune system. Cas9 is a protein that can seek out and “cut” targeted gene strands […]

Despite the hyperbole, private funding is changing the science of aging for the better.

For the past few years, social scientists have been buzzing over a particular topic in molecular biology—gene regulation. The hype has been building steam for some time, but recently, it rocketed to the forefront of public discussion due to a widely circulated piece in the New Yorker. Articles on the topic are almost always fascinating: […]

On a chilly afternoon last October, at a University of Northern Arizona conference, Thomas Whitham, a plant geneticist, proposed a plan to save hundreds of species from extinction. For the last several years, Whitham said, he and his colleagues had used a series of experimental gardens to study how plants are being affected by warming […]

Getting control of the molecular mechanisms that drive rapid mutations.

Did sexual reproduction evolve to keep up with mitochondrial mutation?

A new field called paleoepigenetics is probing how evolution responds to sudden stress.

The forgotten story of the woman who discovered how animals get their shape.

Epigenetics and behaviorism suggest the ancient Greeks were right.

A report from a future where genetic engineering has sabotaged society.

The ratio of boys to girls at conception has been misunderstood for centuries.

“This here is my favorite cabinet,” Hein van Grouw tells me as we walk around the back rooms of the Natural History Museum at Tring, 30 miles northwest of London as the crow flies. He pulls the steel double-doors open, revealing a menagerie of stuffed birds. On the top shelves there are snipes, rails, and […]

Headlines and apocalyptic notions about designer babies proliferated last month after Chinese scientists published the results of a curious set of experiments on human embryos. The researchers were looking to understand whether gene-editing technology could correct, before birth, a malformed gene that can cause a potentially devastating blood disease. They found that the method introduced new […]

“Add little to little and there will be a big pile.” —Ovid When we build complex technologies, despite our best efforts and our desire for clean logic, they often end up being far messier than we intend. They often end up kluges: inelegant solutions that work just well enough. And a reason they end up being […]

A group of Hasidic Jews walking the streets of Brooklyndiluvi.com Anna i Adria via Wikipedia In 1983, Yosef Eckstein an ultra-orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, had reason to be happy: His wife had just given birth to their fifth child. But the couple’s happiness was short-lived: The child was soon diagnosed with Tay–Sachs disease, […]

For many people, 1969 felt like a year when technology could solve all of our problems, a sentiment that reached a crescendo with the Apollo 11 moon landing. But back on Earth, Michael Kaback was a faculty member in pediatrics1 at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and he was frustrated. Kaback had helped some of his […]

Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) uses the VLA (Very Large Array) to look for alien signals. But that’s not the only way. Warner Brothers When people think about SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, they imagine messages sent via radio—Jodie Foster tuning antennas, hoping to pick up signals from the “billions and billions” of star systems […]

Microscope image showing selection of an embryo for IVFScience Photo Library – ZEPHYR via Getty Images For women who have trouble conceiving, being told they’ll need assistance is often accompanied with a sense of dread: what they hoped would be a natural, quick, and inexpensive process (what’s cheaper than natural conception?) can change into a […]

In January, the pharmaceutical company Roche paid more than a billion dollars to buy about half of a small company called Foundation Medicine. Foundation has not invented any new drugs or life-saving devices. Most insurance companies won’t pay for its main product, and like a lot of biotech companies, it loses money. The big bucks are […]

I don’t want to surrender to a lottery. But will I regret not playing?

Thinking of nucleobases as a long sequence of letters may contribute to the illusion that DNA is a language.Neil Palmer / CIAT via Flickr When we talk about genes, we often use expressions inherited from a few influential geneticists and evolutionary biologists, including Francis Crick, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins. These expressions depict DNA as […]

What Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner taught me about being scooped.

It’s time to relax about genetic testing.

Passenger pigeon eggs at the Maine State MuseumBrandon Keim; displayed courtesy of Paula Work, registrar & curator of zoology at the museum The last passenger pigeon died just over a century ago, though they’ve lived on as symbols—of extinction’s awful finality, and also of a human carelessness so immense that it could exterminate without really […]

Genetic engineering will one day create the smartest humans who have ever lived.

“It’s amazing what we let our teachers teach us.”

A Lykoi kitten next to its normal-coated brother, who carries just one version of the Lykoi gene. It’s no accident that Lykois are bred with black cats. “If they have black as their base coats, they really have that werewolf look. Other base coats don’t look quite as striking,” he says. “An orange Lykoi cat […]

This is the final installment of a five-part series. First read Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 to get caught up.  Correction: The text about tests that can be done 10 weeks into pregnancy was changed to clarify the difference between CVS—an invasive test that is available now and can determine whether […]

This is the fourth installment of a five-part series. First read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 to get caught up; then go on to Part 5. Lauren R. Weinstein is a cartoonist, cartooning teacher, and avid gardener who lives in scenic Maplewood, New Jersey. She is currently working on a teenage memoir entitled How to Draw a […]

This is the third installment of a five-part series. First read Part 1 and Part 2 to get caught up; then go on to Part 4 and Part 5. Lauren R. Weinstein is a cartoonist, cartooning teacher, and avid gardener who lives in scenic Maplewood, New Jersey. She is currently working on a teenage memoir entitled How to Draw […]

This is the second installment of a five-part series. See Part 1 first; then go on to Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.  Lauren R. Weinstein is a cartoonist, cartooning teacher, and avid gardener who lives in scenic Maplewood, New Jersey. She is currently working on a teenage memoir entitled, How to Draw a Nose.

This is the first installment of a five-part series. Also see Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. * Correction: The text about the effects of cystic fibrosis has been changed to reflect the improved prognoses for babies born with CF, based on modern treatments. (The doctor originally predicted a likely lung transplant by […]

How genes influence the animal palate.

Any cup you sip from could provide a sample bearing your DNA. dohtoor via Shutterstock Almost everywhere you go, you leave a bit of yourself behind—a hair, a fingernail clipping, a bit of skin, a few skin cells from your lips on a drinking cup. For a long time, that trace of you was little […]

How a “speed gene” test is stirring up horse racing and athletics.

Pregnancy, labor and delivery, and the postpartum period put women in peril, giving rise to precautions that gave them a sense of control, such as orienting the birthing room, charms and rituals, and burying a placenta.Vanessa Hua In a strip mall in the heart of Silicon Valley, the pregnant ladies were seeking out ancient Chinese […]

DNA barcodes could keep restaurants honest.

Dad was back. He played a little with the children, rubbed a few heads with his own, clawed at a wooden post, and then, standing erect with tail straight up, he backed towards a tree, sprayed, and left. The kids scampered over. They stood on their hind legs and carefully examined the spray—the family smell. […]

How DNA puts a face on the missing.

Scientists are changing the rules for how DNA works.

  When you think of fame, you probably picture Hollywood A-listers, big-time political players, or triumphant athletes, the people who routinely see photos of themselves when they glance at magazine and newspapers. But we are each of us an exemplar of the biology of fame. Consider some recent scientific findings regarding the substantial genetic uniqueness […]

Discover genes that unite life on earth.

Take a look at a butterfly’s wing, and you can learn a lesson about life. Not that it’s beautiful, or fragile, or too easily appreciated only when it’s fading—though all that is true, and evident in a wing. Look very close, at the edge of a pattern, where one color turns to another. The demarcation […]

Scientists aren’t exactly sure how many new mutations crop up each generation in humans—for years, the standard estimate was round 100-200, but one 2011 study, using whole genome information from two families, has put it at about 30-50. And the rate of mutation is more than a curiosity: Seeing how many mutations separate us from […]

The variability in how people smell has a lot to do with their genetics.

Personal DNA testing may yet deliver on its promise.

Hope your week went well. It might have changed your genetics.

When the cicadas of Brood II burst into open air—and into song—later this month, after living 17 years in darkness below ground, they will have one thing on their collective, eerily synchronized mind: sex. Though millions of humans inhabiting the mid-Atlantic states will soon hear the insects’ incredible racket, they’re probably unaware that what they’re […]

When the cicadas of Brood II burst into open air—and into song—later this month, after living 17 years in darkness below ground, they will have one thing on their collective, eerily synchronized mind: sex. Though millions of humans inhabiting the mid-Atlantic states will soon hear the insects’ incredible racket, they’re probably unaware that what they’re […]

When the cicadas of Brood II burst into open air—and into song—later this month, after living 17 years in darkness below ground, they will have one thing on their collective, eerily synchronized mind: sex. Though millions of humans inhabiting the mid-Atlantic states will soon hear the insects’ incredible racket, they’re probably unaware that what they’re […]

When an enormous four-finned fish surfaced in a South African fisherman’s catch in 1938, scientists were fascinated by its resemblance to fossilized creatures that had died out millions of years ago. The fish, called a coelacanth, turned out to be the first descendant of those organisms ever spotted by humans. The two living species identified […]

In the next war, instead of a soldier going on a reconnaissance mission into enemy territory, consider this possibility: a cloud of “micro air vehicles,” flying cyborgs, with built-in cameras and microphones, that could be guided by remote control. What military commander wouldn’t want that? DARPA, the research wing of the Department of Defense, has […]

We’re used to the idea that some among us are colorblind, perceiving the world differently because of a quirk in their genetics. And it’s well-known that teenagers and young adults can hear high-pitched sounds that their elders cannot, an ability that’s been exploited by manufacturers of The Mosquito, an anti-loitering device that annoys youth into leaving. […]