Twenty-percent of Caucasians appear to carry a genetic variant that substantially increases their odds of being susceptible to severe cocaine abuse leading to fatal overdosing, say researchers at Ohio State University. The new study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, notes that only one-in-eight African Americans are affected by the variant. The variant, characterized by one or both […]
Individuals with a certain genetic variant are more likely to have a history of uncommitted sex, including one-night stands and acts of infidelity, according to Binghamton University researchers. The new study takes a broad look at sexual behavior, matching choices with genes, and has come up with a new twist on human sexual drivers. The […]
Detailed, accurate evolutionary trees that reveal the relatedness of living things can now be determined much faster and for thousands of species with the help of a novel computing method developed by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin. For hundreds of years, biologists have used evolutionary trees to explain the interconnectedness of plants, […]
The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT. Berwick presented his ideas about language in a session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last […]
The movement of genes between unrelated species (horizontal gene transfer, or HGT) may happen much more frequently than previously believed, allowing species to acquire new genes and functions extremely quickly, say scientists from the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute. Their new study, appearing Science, is based on the discovery of a […]
Writing in the journal Cell, three Boston University biomedical engineers report they have created a genetic dimmer switch that can be used to turn on, shut off, or partially activate a gene’s function. The switch – developed by James Collins, Charles Cantor and Tara Deans – could help advance the field of synthetic biology, which […]
Fossil records indicate that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years ago. It then took about 2.5 billion more years for multi-cellular life to evolve. Then, in the space of only a billion years, plants, mammals, insects, birds and other species exploded across the Earth. Now, scientists from Rice University think they may be […]
Reporting in the journal Science, researchers from the US and Israel say they have cloned a gene from a variety of wild wheat that dramatically increases the protein, zinc and iron content in the grain; a finding that could go a long way to negating the nutritional deficiencies affecting hundreds of millions of people around […]
A new gene therapy based on a disabled AIDS virus carrying genetic material that inhibits HIV replication has produced positive results in a Phase I clinical trial, say researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Reporting in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Penn researcher Carl June said that viral loads in […]
Using mice as their subjects, researchers at Southwestern Medical Center, University of Texas, have discovered a potentially better way in which to study depression in humans. During the course of the study, published in the journal Science, the researchers also made an important finding: the absence of a particular gene has the same effect as […]
