In the late 1950s, dentist and U.S. Navy Captain Kirk C. Hoerman, then a young man in his 30s, attempted to answer a bold question: Might the saliva of prostate cancer patients have different characteristics from that of healthy people? Could it contain traces of a disease that’s so far away from the mouth?

A detailed examination of gene activity in various organisms, including humans, reveals a new hallmark of the aging process

Hello, old friend.

People often think they know what causes chronic depression. Surveys indicate that more than 80% of the public blames a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. That idea is widespread in pop psychology and cited in research papers and medical textbooks. Listening to Prozac, a book that describes the life-changing value of treating depression with medications that aim to correct this imbalance, spent months on the New York Times bestseller list.

Last year, Verve Therapeutics started the first human trial of a CRISPR treatment that could benefit most people—a signal that gene editing may be ready to go mainstream.

All mammals hold a backup copy of cellular youth, a new study says. All we have to do is trigger the switch to turn back the clock, researchers say.

The finding involves mice, but represents an important milestone in understanding what causes cells to age.

Instead of cutting out chunks of the genome to disable malfunctioning genes, base editing makes a smaller, more precise swap.

A 13-year-old girl whose leukaemia had not responded to other treatments now has no detectable cancer cells after receiving a dose of immune cells that were genetically edited to attack the cancer.

Humanity carries traces of other populations in our DNA – and a new study shows how one of these ancestors has influenced the immune systems of modern Papuans.

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.

New research led by the global research-for-development organization Bioversity International confirms that the genomes of today’s domesticated banana varieties contain traces of three extra, as yet unknown, ancestors.

The history of the banana is more complicated than you might have ever imagined (if you ever thought about it at all).

Key is whether the gene-editing technology can stop the virus from replicating.

The myriads of microbes in our gut, collectively termed the microbiome, are considered important to our health, but they can also harbor bacteria that contribute to inflammatory bowel disease or other disorders. Currently, however, it is impossible to target such disease-contributing bacteria without harming the surrounding beneficial microbes.

There's something really peculiar about ferns.

Seventy thousand species. That’s the best guess for the tally of life, including plants, animals and fungi, found in Britain and Ireland. And it’s the target of one of biology's most ambitious projects - scientists want to map the DNA of every single one of these organisms.

A new CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function using a tool called Perturb-seq. The work was led by Jonathan Weissman and colleagues at MIT and the Whitehead Institute, and is free for other scientists to use.

When Kurt Benirschke started collecting skin samples from rare and endangered animals in 1972, he didn't have a firm plan on what to do with them. As a researcher at the University of California San Diego, he believed that one day the tools would be developed to use them to save those animals. A few years later, he moved his collection to San Diego Zoo, and called it the Frozen Zoo.

A new method developed at the University of Copenhagen has been used to identify more than 1,000 bactericidal viruses in the human intestines. The researchers believe the discovery may help fight antibiotic resistance.