How does a bacterium know it's time to split apart?

Bacterial cells do not wake up one morning and decide to become parents. But there is a point in their cell cycle—after growing sufficiently and replicating their genomes—when they split in two, creating new cells that ...

Similar genetic elements underlie vocal learning in mammals

The vocalizations of humans, bats, whales, seals and songbirds vastly differ from each other. Humans and birds, for example, are separated by some 300 million years of evolution. But scientists studying how these animals ...

Researchers define new class of regulatory element in DNA

Researchers at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine's Laboratory of Gene Regulation, led by Professor Doug Higgs and Dr. Mira Kassouf, have published a study in the journal Cell, in which they reveal another ...

A new tool to study complex genome interactions

People who owned black-and-white television sets until the 1980s didn't know what they were missing until they got a color TV. A similar switch could happen in the world of genomics as researchers at the Berlin Institute ...

Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient "junk" DNA

Butterfly wing patterns have a basic plan to them, which is manipulated by non-coding regulatory DNA to create the diversity of wings seen in different species, according to new research.

Making CRISPR hype more of a reality

This year, we celebrate 10 years of genome editing with CRISPR. The system is often referred to as molecular scissors, and this designation is quite accurate for its first applications. These short 10 years were marked by ...

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