The headline figure of lifespan being around “50% heritable” risks being misunderstood as meaning genes determine half of a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.’ ...

First came AlphaFold. Now comes AlphaGenome for DNA. When scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2003, they revealed the full set of DNA instructions that make a person. But we still didn’t ...

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 ...

For decades, geneticists have known that most common illnesses are not caused by a single rogue gene but by intricate constellations of DNA variants acting together in specific cells. Now a new ...

Scientists have identified hundreds of genes that may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease but the roles these genes play in the brain are poorly understood. This lack of understanding ...