We thought we had bigger things to worry about than Chinese bat coronaviruses. It is now clear we made a massive mistake.

Many basic and clinical researchers are testing the potential of a simple and efficient gene editing approach to study and correct disease-causing mutations for conditions ranging from blindness to cancer, but the technology is constrained by a requirement that a certain short DNA sequence be present at the gene editing site.

In a paddock in rural Australia are five calves that look just like any others. But they're not — they're biological hazards.

One of the more startling discoveries arising from genomic sequencing of ancient hominin DNA is the realisation that all humans outside Africa have traces of DNA in their genomes that do not belong to our own species.

What would the implications be if decoding your genes cost less than a pair of designer jeans? We might soon find out after a Chinese company claimed it can sequence the human genome for $100. The speed at which the price of genetic sequencing has fallen has been astonishing, from $50,000 a decade ago to roughly $600 today. For a long time, the industry saw the $1,000 genome as the inflection point at which we would enter the genomic age—where getting a read out of your DNA would be within reach for huge swathes of the population.

For decades, scientists have been intrigued by tiny viruses whose genetic material can be read both forward and backward. New research begins to explain this puzzling property.

Everybody wants to live as long as possible. We try our best to take care of ourselves — we watch our diet, we stay active, and we throw away the cigarettes. Owing to our gallant efforts, and thanks to advances in science and medicine, human life expectancy across the world doubled in the 20th century. The average human can now expect to live past 70 years old.

DNA is the repository for genetic information. We’ve been tinkering with it since the 1970s, trying to alter the characteristics of organisms in a single generation, like boosting crop resistance to insect pests or even making pigs glow. Only recently have researchers popularized DNA as something else: a construction material. Earlier this year, researchers assembled an intelligent and autonomous nanostructure entirely out of DNA that delivered and released a cancer drug.

The tool was used in an attempt to treat a patient's blindness. It may take up to a month to see if it worked.

Modern genomes from Nigeria and Sierra Leone show signals that scientists call "ghost" DNA — from an unknown human ancestor. That means that prehistoric humans likely procreated with an unknown group.

"In practice, we don't usually get any further than a sort of reference face, such as 'a European male.' That's not much use to a forensic investigator."

A 210,000-year-old skull in Greece is the earliest evidence for modern humans in Eurasia and suggests they left Africa earlier than previously thought.

Gene editing is advancing at a faster pace than most of us can keep up with. One significant recent announcement was gene editing tool CRISPR’s application to non-genetic diseases thanks to a new ability to edit single letters in RNA.

Long before climate change drove them to abandon their thriving cities, a group of hunter-gatherers settled in the Indus River Valley as farmers, leading to the creation of one of the world's first large-scale urban societies, complete with booming e

How is the retina formed? And how do neurons differentiate to become individual components of the visual system? By focusing on the early stages of this complex process, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, in collaboration with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), have identified the genetic programmes governing the birth of different types of retinal cells and their capacity to wire to the correct part of the brain, where they transmit visual information.

Method that generated drug leads may be flawed

In a milestone for synthetic biology, colonies of E. coli thrive with DNA constructed from scratch by humans, not nature.

There's an invader in their DNA.

A study that raised questions over the future health of the world’s first gene-edited babies has been retracted because of key errors that undermined its conclusion.

Andrew Anzalone was restless. It was late fall of 2017. The year was winding down, and so was his MD/PhD program at Columbia. Trying to figure out what was next in his life, he’d taken to long walks in the leaf-strewn West Village. One night as he paced up Hudson Street, his stomach filled with La Colombe coffee and his mind with Crispr gene editing papers, an idea began to bubble through the caffeine brume inside his brain.