An ambitious project has been launched that will involve sequencing genomes of 100,000 individuals to improve our understanding of a range of diseases and – hopefully – eventually find new treatments for…
When a human bone was found on a gravelly riverbank by a bone-carver who was searching for mammoth ivory, little did he know it would provide the oldest modern-human genome yet sequenced. The anatomically…
Once the most numerous bird species in North America, passenger pigeons went from numbering in the billions to being extinct in less than a century. Their decline has been mostly blamed on intensive hunting…
Human skin is a garden of microbes which is home to about 1,000 bacterial species. Most are benign but some invade the skin and cause illness – and of these, antibiotic resistant bacteria are particularly…
Akshat Rathi, The Conversation and Declan Perry, The Conversation
Bacterial diseases cause millions of deaths every year. Most of these bacteria were benign at some point in their evolutionary past, and we don’t always understand what turned them into disease-causing…
Rapid technological advances mean it’s faster and cheaper than ever to read a person’s entire genetic code, known as the genome. Genomic sequencing has two potential applications in health: the care of…
Clara Gaff, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and Paul Waring, The University of Melbourne
Sydney’s Garvan Institute is this week promoting its acquisition of an Illumina machine which it says can sequence the whole human genome for $1,000. The institute hopes genomic sequencing will become…
Some recent headlines from Australian newspapers: NSW hospitals worst place for Golden Staph; CA-MRSA - the killer in our midst; Superbug onslaught. By now, most people are aware that antibiotic-resistant…
In 1994, a crypt containing 242 bodies was discovered in Vác, Hungary. Many of the bodies were naturally mummified, including the remains of a woman, Terézia Hausmann, who died apparently from tuberculosis…
Public investment in the Human Genome Project was expected to deliver a global public good that would help generate scientific breakthroughs. But open access to our genetic blueprint is a precondition…
The Human Genome Project (HGP) – to put it simply – has changed science. It has contributed to making biology the science of the 21st century, as physics was the science of the 20th century. It has driven…
Are you a mutant? Am I? The advent of personal genomics makes this question less like a Marvel Comics story idea than it did in the past. But, as Spiderman’s uncle Ben might have put it: with great power…
A team of international researchers, including a number of Australian scientists, have identified 74 new areas of the genome that can increase a person’s risk of developing breast, prostate and ovarian…
Imagine a future where doctors take a strand of your hair or a drop of your blood and tell you your DNA predicts a 78% risk of developing heart disease. On the plus side, it also predicts exactly which…