Received An At-Home DNA Test As A Holiday Gift? Proceed With Caution
If you or a family member received a consumer genetic testing kit as a holiday gift, you probably weren’t alone. Sales of at-home DNA testing kits reportedly soared in 2017,…
genetics
Flower Or Flesh? Genetics Explain Mosquito Preference
Imagine a world in which mosquitoes choose blossoms over blood. Nice, right? There already exists a mosquito species called Wyeomyia smithii in which most of the bugs refuse blood meals in favor of sweet…
DNA Reveals That Silky Anteaters Are Seven Species
The silky anteater (Cyclopes didactylus) has previously been recognized to be a single species divided into several sub-species. But a new genetic analysis, published in the Zoological Journal of the…
Google Has Released an AI Tool That Makes Sense of Your Genome
Almost 15 years after scientists first sequenced the human genome, making sense of the enormous amount of data that encodes human life remains a formidable challenge. But it is also…
Everything Your Biology Teacher Told You About Earlobes Is Wrong
Most of us learned in high school biology that genetics can sometimes be incredibly simple. Some physical traits are the result of an easy equation containing a pair of parents’ genes….
CRISPR-Carrying Nanoparticles Edit the Genome
In a new study, MIT researchers have developed nanoparticles that can deliver the CRISPR genome-editing system and specifically modify genes in mice. The team used nanoparticles to carry the CRISPR…