When we think about genetic inheritance, we usually leap to DNA, the four-letter code containing the instructions for building a living organism. Scientists know that DNA encodes everything from hair ...

Forty years ago, a postdoctoral researcher named James McGrath who would go on to spend more than three decades as a clinical geneticist and research scientist at Yale, made a discovery that advanced ...

DNA transcription is the vital first step needed for switching on our genes. For a gene to be switched on, it must be acted upon by an enzyme called RNA polymerase. This is a molecular machine which ...

HALF a century before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck outlined his own theory of evolution. A cornerstone of this was the idea that ...

Scientists have long known that the DNA code in genes is not the only way to pass genetic traits from parents to offspring. "Epigenetic" marks—chemical modifications to DNA that don't change the DNA ...

Advances in genome sequencing are giving more families access to prenatal genetic testing and new information about an unborn ...

University of Queensland researchers have discovered a mechanism in DNA that regulates how disease-causing mutations are inherited. Dr. Anne Hahn and Associate Professor Steven Zuryn from UQ's ...

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen ...

Severe mental disorders like major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia share a genetic overlap with ...