Tracking Bat Movements to Predict Rabies Outbreaks

The foreign within

A recent study, published in Genome Biology, claims to have found at least 145 ‘foreign’ genes in human DNA . In order to detect these ‘intruders’, a team of scientists scanned human DNA for...

The Book of Life – Rewritten?

All life we know shares one common feature: DNA. From bacteria to humans, our genetic code is written in the same 4 chemical “letters”, the nucleotides Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Guanine (G) and Cytosine...

Heino Boekhout via Twitter (Licence) DNA

Operation on the Open Genome

What can genetic modification do for our health? Michaela Mrschtik examines how a novel DNA cutting tool paves the way for futuristic treatments of currently incurable diseases. New ‘DNA scissors’, called CRISPR/Cas or simply...