Genetics

  1. Health & Medicine

    How some ticks protect themselves from deadly bacteria on human skin

    A gene that ticks acquired from bacteria 40 million years ago may help the arachnids keep potential pathogens at bay while feeding on blood.

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  2. Genetics

    A key to the mystery of fast-evolving genes was found in ‘junk DNA’

    A new study challenges a long-held belief that essential genes change little over time.

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  3. Genetics

    Penicillin allergies may be linked to one immune system gene

    Researchers have located a shared hot spot — on the HLA-B gene — in the immune system in people who say they have penicillin allergies.

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  4. Microbes

    How malaria parasites hide from the human immune system

    By turning genes on or off, the parasite keeps blood levels low but persistent, so infection doesn’t set off alarm bells for the immune system.

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  5. Genetics

    Gene-editing tool CRISPR wins the chemistry Nobel

    A gene-editing tool developed just eight years ago that has “revolutionized the life sciences” nabbed the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Hepatitis C discoveries win 2020 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine

    The 2020 medicine Nobel recognizes work that found that a novel virus was to blame for chronic hepatitis and led to a test to screen blood donations.

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  7. Genetics

    Strict new guidelines lay out a path to heritable human gene editing

    But scientists say making changes in DNA that can be passed on to future generations still isn’t safe and effective, yet.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    In a first, a person’s immune system fought HIV — and won

    Some rare people may purge most HIV from their bodies, leaving only broken copies of the virus or copies locked in molecular prisons, from which there is no escape.

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  9. Life

    Climate change, not hunters, may have killed off woolly rhinos

    Ancient DNA indicates that numbers of woolly rhinos held steady long after people arrived on the scene.

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  10. Animals

    How tuatara live so long and can withstand cool weather

    Tuatara may look like your average lizard, but they’re not. Now, researchers have deciphered the rare reptiles’ genome, or genetic instruction book.

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  11. Animals

    An immune system quirk may help anglerfish fuse with mates during sex

    Deep-sea anglerfish that fuse to mate lack genes involved in the body’s response against pathogens or foreign tissue.

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  12. Genetics

    A bacterial toxin enables the first mitochondrial gene editor

    Researchers have engineered a protein from bacteria that kills other microbes to change DNA in a previously inaccessible part of the cell.

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