Our experiences of taste are so vivid and personal it can be hard to imagine how people can turn their nose up at your favourite comfort food. Research shows the explanation could be in your genes.
Partial layout of the graves discovered during the excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt.
Thuringian State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology/Karin Sczech + Katharina Bielefeld
A German town needed to relocate a medieval graveyard to build a parking garage. A positive side effect: Scientists got to sequence the DNA of Ashkenazi Jews who lived more than 600 years ago.
Paternal and maternal genes drive fetal development in different directions.
Valentina Kruchinina/iStock via Getty Images
Genetic conflict may play a role in pregnancy complications, such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, as well as developmental disorders.
Statistical pitfalls in GWAS can result in misleading conclusions about whether some traits (like long horns or spotted skin, in the case of dinosaurs) are genetically linked.
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Richard Border, University of California, Los Angeles and Noah Zaitlen, University of California, Los Angeles
People don’t randomly select who they have children with. And that means an underlying assumption in research that tries to link particular genes to certain diseases or traits is wrong.
This technique could also be applied to other conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease.
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg with Moshe Biton (right) and Aviv Regev (left). The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is one of the major funders of the Human Cell Atlas.
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Pioneered by the Human Cell Atlas consortium, our understanding of the human body is about to be transformed – and with it, the way we treat and prevent disease
The success rate of IVF still remains at around 30%.
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If you ever feel like you can’t stop eating sugar, you are responding precisely as programmed by natural selection. What was once an evolutionary advantage has a different effect today.
Samantha Lee, The University of Western Australia; David Mackey, The University of Western Australia, and Serena Wee, The University of Western Australia
Understanding your genes is a great way to understand certain things about yourself — yet, who we are is determined by so much more than just DNA.
The real message is how old you are when you first have sex and have your first child is controlled by a little bit of nature and a lot of nurture.
A complete human genome, seen here in pairs of chromosomes, offers a wealth of information, but it is hard connect genetics to traits or disease.
HYanWong/Wikimedia Comons
The first full human genome was sequenced 20 years ago. Now, a project is underway to sequence 1 million genomes to better understand the complex relationship between genetics, diversity and disease.
MRNA is an important messenger, carrying the instructions for life from DNA to the rest of the cell.
ktsimage/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Recently in the spotlight for its role in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, mRNA is not a new invention. It’s a crucial messenger molecule at work every day in every cell in your body.