Junk DNA in birds may hold key to safe, efficient gene therapy

The recent approval of a CRISPR-Cas9 therapy for sickle cell disease demonstrates that gene editing tools can do a superb job of knocking out genes to cure hereditary disease. But it's still not possible to insert whole genes ...

New genes found that can arise 'from nothing'

The complexity of living organisms is encoded within their genes, but where do these genes come from? Researchers at the University of Helsinki resolved outstanding questions around the origin of small regulatory genes, and ...

Yeast with more than 50% synthetic genome is created in the lab

Researchers have combined over seven synthetic chromosomes that were made in the lab into a single yeast cell, resulting in a strain with more than 50% synthetic DNA that survives and replicates similarly to wild yeast strains.

Hitting reset to start a new embryo

New work by scientists in the U.S. and China shows how a fertilized egg cell, or zygote, hits "reset" so that the newly formed embryo can develop according to its own genetic program. The study was published July 17 in Nature.

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