When we think about genetic inheritance, we usually leap to DNA, the four-letter code containing the instructions for building a living organism. Scientists know that DNA encodes everything from hair ...

Scientists have long known that the DNA code in genes is not the only way to pass genetic traits from parents to offspring. "Epigenetic" marks—chemical modifications to DNA that don't change the DNA ...

HALF a century before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck outlined his own theory of evolution. A cornerstone of this was the idea that ...

Forty years ago, a postdoctoral researcher named James McGrath who would go on to spend more than three decades as a clinical geneticist and research scientist at Yale, made a discovery that advanced ...

DNA transcription is the vital first step needed for switching on our genes. For a gene to be switched on, it must be acted upon by an enzyme called RNA polymerase. This is a molecular machine which ...

Genetic inheritance may sound straightforward: One gene causes one trait or a specific illness. When doctors use genetics, it’s usually to try to identify a disease-causing gene to help guide ...

Medicinal plants are considered extremely important globally in the field of medicine, pharmacological studies, and biodiversity preservation. Climate ...

A great part of living in the 21st century is that if you have a device that connects to the internet, you have access to hundreds, if not thousands of experts who are often eager to share in-depth ...

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen ...

A High Court judge has called on Parliament to enact a law regulating the use of DNA testing, saying that courts are increasingly being forced to resolve paternity disputes without a clear legal ...