Genetics & Molecular Biology

I'll lay out something a lot of people won't like to hear; science is about understanding the world according to natural laws and that means sometimes breaking the laws of nature.  How far that…

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 33.8 percent of American adults are obese. placing them at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain…

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." — attributed to Charles Darwin. There is general agreement that the…

I don't want to sound alarmist, but glow-in-the-dark animals are real-- and it's not just cute kitty-cats.  As reported earlier here at Science 2.0, scientists did this and that to genetics to…

Retroviral proteases are a class of enzymes that play an important role in the maturation and proliferation of the AIDS virus. As such, this class of enzymes is a subject of intense research. The…

Recently, a lot of attention has gone to epigenetics, or heritable changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in DNA sequence. An example of such a mechanism is DNA…

Although genetic sequencing sounded exciting - I'll send you a tube full of spit, you tell me what diseases I'm going to get - the reality was less thrilling, and less useful. There are diseases with…

A research team at John Hopkins Medical Institutions has introduced synthetic chromosomes into yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae, see figure 1), in an effort to better understand how genomes work, and…

We all know a high-fat diet is going to be bad for most people, but why? A study in mice showed that those lacking the gene-expression-controlling enzyme HDAC3 that were fed a high-fat diet…

A genome-based immunization strategy may 'illuminate' ways to combat AIDS and other diseases.  Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) causes AIDS in cats as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)…