If you’re an animal, you inherit your genes from your parents at the moment of conception, right? Not quite, according to scientists from the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), who have uncovered evidence of “massive” horizontal gene transfer in the animal known as the bdelloid rotifer. Reporting their findings in Science, the researchers say […]
Scientists have been pondering the fundamental creative force behind life on Earth for millennia, and now, thanks to almost a year’s worth of number-crunching on a supercomputer, Rice University physicist and bioengineer Michael Deem thinks he has the answer: a changing environment may organize the structure of genetic information itself. “Our results suggest that the […]
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 […]
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 […]
