A large genetic screen has revealed how stem cells transform into brain cells, exposing hundreds of genes that make this ...

Take a puff of nicotine for the first time, and your DNA plays an important role, alongside social and environmental factors, in shaping what happens next. In recent years, scientists have identified ...

Epigenetics refers to how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unlike genetic changes or ...

De novo genes are evolution’s magic trick—new genes appearing from non-coding DNA, much like a rabbit pulled from a hat. Once considered impossible, de novo genes have been identified in Drosophila ...

Near the end of the classic 1942 movie Casablanca when Major Strasser is shot, Captain Renault famously pretends not to know who fired the gun and orders his officers to “round up the usual suspects.” ...

For decades, geneticists have known that most common illnesses are not caused by a single rogue gene but by intricate constellations of DNA variants acting together in specific cells. Now a new ...

Thanks to increasingly efficient and affordable gene sequencing technologies, we can now chart our genetic blueprint in unprecedented detail. But what does each gene do? Of the roughly 20,000 genes ...