Could your parents’ lifestyle choices affect how long you live? And could this effect not be directly related to your genes? Scientists studying my favourite roundworm (C. elegans) have discovered a surprising answer: yes, they can. Why does the offspring live longer? Researchers at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus made an unexpected discovery while studying aging […]
Ever wondered why certain diseases seem to run in families, or how tiny changes in our DNA can lead to serious health conditions? Scientists have developed a powerful new tool that simultaneously analyzes both DNA and RNA within individual cells, offering unprecedented insight into how genetic variations contribute to disease. The Problem With Current Technology […]
Anthropology • Archaeology • Ecology • Environment • Genetics
Author: Gerlinde Bigga, Scientific Coordinator of the Leibniz Science Campus “Geogenomic Archaeology Campus Tübingen”, University of Tübingen The last two decades have seen a revolution in scientists’ ability to reconstruct the past. This has been made possible through technological advances in the way DNA is extracted from ancient bones and analysed. These advances have revealed […]
Can a father’s lifestyle choices before conception influence the health of his future children? New research reveals that environmental factors affecting fathers can leave molecular footprints in embryos, shaping development and potentially impacting long-term health. Epigenetic inheritance For decades, scientists believed that inheritance was controlled exclusively by DNA sequences passed from parents to offspring. Today […]
A rare North American bumble bee may have been on a path toward extinction long before modern human impacts, suggesting that its long-term genetic vulnerability made it especially fragile and less able to cope with both past and current environmental stresses. The study focused on the Franklin bumble bee, once found only in parts of […]
DNA sequencing is getting cheaper than ever. This, coupled with advances in speed and portability, are allowing us to apply deep sequencing beyond the lab to environmental substrates, and analyse this eDNA to gain information and monitor biodiversity at a time where it is being lost at an unprecedented rate. This environmental DNA can be […]
All cellular life as we know it today stems from a single common ancestor, from which all modern lineages emerged. The origin of cellular life is thought to be the node in the Tree of Life from which Archaea and Bacteria, the two primary domains, diverged. The universality of some features across cellular life evidences […]
Author: Lluís Montoliu , researcher, Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB – CSIC, Spain) Garfield, star of the eponymous comic strip created by Jim Davis in 1978, is, like many of the cats that roam our homes, orange. He is orange in the same way that some people are redheaded, some horses are brown, or some […]
Scientists believe individuals of the most recently discovered hominin group (the Denisovans) that interbred with modern day humans passed on some of their genes via multiple, distinct interbreeding events that helped shape early human history. In 2010, the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published, and comparisons with modern human genomes revealed that Neanderthal […]
When you think about DNA, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the double helix model published by Watson and Crick. However, in the 90s scientists identified a particular conformation in DNA molecules in vitro (in a tube): single chain knot-like loops that they called i-motifs. These structures form because, instead of the […]