Small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, with enormous eyes and an appetite for meat, tarsiers are an anomaly of nature. They are also our distant cousins, according to scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who recently sequenced and analyzed the tarsier genome. The findings, published Oct. 6 in Nature Communications, place tarsiers on…
Three ISG “alums,” Laura Foster, Ruha Benjamin, and Lindsay Smith, have published papers in the most recent issue of Science, Technology & Human Values, in a special issue entitled “Resisting Power, Retooling Justice: Promises of Postcolonial Technosciences. See the full issue here: Special Issue: Resisting Power, Retooling Justice: Promises of Feminist Postcolonial Technosciences
Remnants of extinct monkeys are hiding inside you, along with those of lizards, jellyfish and other animals. Your DNA is built upon gene fragments from primal ancestors. Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made it more likely that ancestral genes, along with ancestral proteins, can be confidently identified and reconstructed. They have benchmarked a vital tool that…
An international team of researchers has sequenced a strain of the Zika virus that will be used as a World Health Organization (WHO) reference strain to identify Zika virus infection in the blood, thus making it easier to diagnose the disease. While the reference material will undergo formal WHO review in October, the agency has given the go-ahead for the…
There’s no need to reinvent the genetic wheel. That’s one lesson of a new study that looks to the saliva of humans, gorillas, orangutans, macaques and African green monkeys for insights into evolution. The research, published on Aug. 25 in Scientific Reports, examined a gene called MUC7 that tells the body how to create a salivary protein of the same…
Scientists say they are closer to pinning down the genetic causes of inherited diseases ranging from muscular dystrophy to certain types of heart disease after analysing the DNA of more than 60,000 people. Researchers have discovered more than 3,000 genes in which certain mutations are likely to play a role in disease, as well as more than 160 genetic mutations…