Genetics & Molecular Biology

Systems biology is a trendy field right now, but, despite the fact that it's hyped as some amazing, new, holistic approach to biology, the questions systems biologists are asking aren't new. Check…

You're sitting in a room filled with a gazillion air molecules - how likely is it that most of those air molecules will spontaneously end up in the corner of the room opposite of where you're sitting…

A class of drugs already approved as cancer treatments might also help to beat alcohol addiction. That's the conclusion of a discovery in flies of a gene, dubbed happyhour, that has an important and…

Scientists sometimes regret when the terms they use in a scientific way get a colloquial meaning.   In physics, Peter Higgs has to like his name recognition but might edit out references to a '…

Our genome is a patchwork of neighborhoods that couldn't be more different: Some areas are hustling and bustling with gene activity, while others are sparsely populated and in perpetual lock-down.…

A new report published in Cell says that a heart beat and blood circulation are critical signals for the production of blood-forming, or hematopoietic, stem cells in the developing embryo. The…

Can fundamental genes acquire new functions?  A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Indiana University Bloomington biologist Armin Moczek and research associate…

As Feynman told the story in late 1959: We have friends in other fields---in biology, for instance. We physicists often look at them and say, "You know the reason you fellows are making so little…

There's a line that politicians opposed to embryonic stem cell research have been peddling lately: recent breakthroughs in stem cell technology have now made ethically questionable embryonic stem…

Will we ever have a set of standardized biochemical devices that synthetic biologists can snap together to make more complex systems? I'm skeptical that any single standardized biological device will…