Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her identical twin sister, Carly, bought DNA ancestry kits from five of the most popular companies in the industry. Find out why some of the results they received left a team of computational biologists at Yale University baffled.

Geneticists have begun using old bones to make sweeping claims about the distant past. But their revisions to the human story are making some scholars of prehistory uneasy.

Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her identical twin sister, Carly, bought DNA ancestry kits from five of the most popular companies in the industry. Find out why some of the results they received left a team of computational biologists at Yale University baffled.

Researchers say a pack of wild canines found frolicking near the beaches of the Texas Gulf Coast carries a substantial amount of red wolf genes, a surprising discovery because the animal was declared extinct in the wild nearly 40 years ago. By David Warren.

A Montreal woman who spent more than 40 years searching for her father flew to Kelowna to be reunited with him on Saturday. As she waited outside the hospital, Sandra Tirone said she couldn’t believe it was happening.

The cryobank is a rich source of genetic knowledge of hundreds of creatures. It may one day be used to bring endangered species back from the brink and deepen the gene pool of wild populations.

We rarely portray Neanderthals, our close relatives, as telegenic. Museum exhibits give them wild tangles of hair, and Hollywood reduces them to grunting unsophisticates. Their skulls suggest broad faces, tiny chins and jutting brows.

Tweaks to the tomato’s genes could turn it into a spicy one-stop shop for the salsa of the future, Popular Science reports. Shared ancestry with hot peppers, such as the jalapeno, gives the mild-mannered tomato all the genetic tools needed to set the human mouth ablaze. Scientists outline two genetic pathways to turn tomatoes spicy in new research published this week in Trends in Plant Science. The motivation for turning up the heat on the tomato isn’t just culinary.

Scientists have genetically engineered plants so they grow up to 40 per cent larger by tweaking the process they use to turn sunlight into food. Photosynthesis allows plants to harvest the sun’s energy and produces vital oxygen as a by-product, fuelling the rich array of life on Earth. However, this mechanism is hampered by an energy intensive process called photorespiration, which plants have evolved to work around an inefficiency present in regular photosynthesis.

Mention artificial intelligence (AI) or artificial neural networks, and images of computers may come to mind. AI-based pattern recognition has a wide variety of real-world uses, such as medical diagnostics, navigation systems, voice-based authentication, image classification, handwriting recognition, speech programs, and text-based processing.

Death was the great leveller, but new life-extension technologies will widen the gap between the haves and havenots

What is the deadliest animal on earth? It’s a question that brings to mind fearsome lions, tigers, sharks and crocodiles. But the answer is an animal that is no more than 1 centimeter long. A few mosquito species, out of the thousands that populate different environments, are the deadliest animals on earth. Anopheles mosquitoes alone, transmit malaria through their bite and annually infect more than 200 million people, and are responsible for 400,000 deaths per year, of which 70 percent are children under the age of 5.

Gene editing is one of the most promising new approaches to treating human disease today. It also raises "enormous" ethical questions, Bill Gates recently warned, and "could make inequality worse, especially if it is available only for wealthy people." "I am surprised that these issues haven't generated more attention from the general public," he said in a December blog post. "This might be the most important public debate we haven't been having widely enough."

Popular spit-in-a-tube genetics-testing companies like Ancestry and 23andMe can — and frequently do — sell your data to drugmakers. But on Wednesday, one of those partnerships became much more explicit, when the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline announced it was acquiring a $300 million stake in 23andMe. As part of a four-year deal between the two companies, GlaxoSmithKline will comb 23andMe's genetic data to look for new drugs to develop, also referred to as drug targets. It will also use the genetic data to inform how patients are selected for clinical trials.

Neanderthal dental plaque is a precious commodity, so it’s a little embarrassing when you’re trying to dislodge a piece and it goes flying across the room. “We just stood still, and everyone’s like: Where is it? Where is it?” recalls Laura Weyrich from the University of Adelaide. “Usually, we try to wrap the skull in foil and work underneath it, but that time, the foil didn’t happen to cover a small area.”

The amount of close and comforting contact between infants and their caregivers can affect children at the molecular level, an effect detectable four years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

​An exciting new study has demonstrated how a new kind of CRISPR technique can increase the expression of certain genes, instead of the more traditional approach of cutting or editing DNA. The method was tested in mice, targeting genes associated with hunger, and stopped the animals becoming obese.​

He Jiankui claims he created twin girls who had been edited so they were resistant to HIV. Was that ethical? Or even legal?

One thing about our ancestors has become increasingly clear: early humans loved to get down, even with other species

Study confirms rare paternal mitochondrial transmission in three families.

In the latest issue of Genome Research, a group of North American scientists have, for the first time ever, published a full map of the cannabis genome. Among the myriad of interesting insights to glean from the chart is the finding that the genes that encode for THC and CBD production evolved thanks to bits of DNA introduced by viruses that infected the plant and successfully colonized its genome millions of years ago.

Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and... groundcherries? A little-known fruit about the size of a marble could become agriculture's next big berry crop.

Scientists break the rules of reproduction, so what does it mean for the future of sex?

Newly sequenced Native genomes showcase a wealth of surprises, from previously unknown populations to unique high-altitude adaptations.

A Chinese researcher who claims to have created the first gene-edited babies, He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUST), in Shenzhen, is now facing investigation over whether the experiment broke Chinese laws or regulations. On Sunday, MIT Technology Review was first to disclose a secretive project in China to produce children whose genomes had been modified to make them resistant to HIV.

Not all DNA is the same, and science has long held that not all kinds of DNA are passed down from both your mother and your father. But it looks like the time has come to rewrite the textbooks.

AI is now at the forefront of DNA structural analysis thanks to new genomics research from a team at Stanford University, California. The paper, published in Nature Genetics reveals that deep learning AI is now capable of understanding and predicting pattern changes in DNA structures. These findings suggest that AI analysis of DNA structures now surpass human capabilities due to its speed and accuracy. This also means that genomics is likely the next field of research to benefit from developments in artificial intelligence.

A long-dead Scandinavian woman has yielded bacterial DNA showing that she contracted the earliest known case of the plague in humans. DNA extracted from the woman’s teeth comes from a newly identified ancient strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, the oldest ever found. The woman’s bones, which date from 5,040 to 4,867 years ago, were found nearly 20 years ago in a mass grave at an ancient farming site in Sweden.

A Chinese scientist recently claimed he had produced the world’s first gene-edited babies, setting off a global firestorm. If true — the scientist has not yet published data that would confirm it — his actions would be a sensational breach of international scientific conventions. Although gene editing holds promise to potentially correct dangerous disease-causing mutations and treat some medical conditions, there are many safety and ethical concerns about editing human embryos.

Researchers have developed new dynamic DNA origami technology.

We did this. By David Nield.

Biomedical engineers have used a CRISPR/Cas9 genetic engineering technique to turn off a gene that regulates cholesterol levels in adult mice, leading to reduced blood cholesterol levels and gene repression lasting for six months after a single treatment. This marks the first time researchers have delivered CRISPR/Cas9 repressors for targeted therapeutic gene silencing in adult animal models. The study appears in Nature Communications.

The forensic use of DNA is rightly regarded as one of the most reliable ways of establishing the identity of someone who was present at a crime scene. As technology has advanced, it is possible to use extremely small traces of genetic material to...

For the first time, biologists are trying to get the CRISPR gene-editing machinery directly into mature human sperm, rather than into fertilised embryos. The work is still at an early stage but could lead to a new way to prevent inherited diseases. Around half a dozen teams have used the CRISPR genome-editing method to alter the DNA of human embryos but it is still far from clear whether this approach is safe. One issue is that the embryo...

In 2011, Sonia Vallabh was handed a genetic report that contained a death sentence. But it also held a map for how to escape. Her body, she learned, harbored a gene mutation, a single wrong letter of DNA in her “prion” gene, that would eventually lead to a rare brain condition called fatal familial insomnia. Her mother had died of it the year before, and the test had revealed Vallabh had inherited the flaw too.