Month: January 2016

Research led by UCL, Yale and University of California, San Francisco has shown that the hormone estrogen alleviates the sleep disruption experienced by zebrafish genetically designed to help understand the biology of autism spectrum disorder […]

Having overweight parents significantly increases your risk of obesity, but the inheritance of specific mutations can’t always explain why this is the case. In a study published January 28 in Cell, researchers show that differences […]

Chronic pain may reprogram the way genes work in the immune system, according to a new study by McGill University researchers published in the journal Scientific Reports. “We found that chronic pain changes the way […]

Scientists have pinpointed the cells that are likely to trigger common brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis and intellectual disabilities. It is the first time researchers have been able to identify the particular cell […]

DNA damage can lead to gene inactivation or deregulation and cause various diseases such as cancer; however, many DNA repair mechanisms allow cells to survive against such damage. A study lead by Antoine Simoneau of […]

Could human suicide have evolutionary roots in self-sacrificial behaviors like those seen in species such as honeybees and ants? A Florida State University researcher who is one of the nation’s foremost experts in suicide is […]

RNA sequencing could help predict future outbreaks. Advances in genetic sequencing are uncovering emerging diseases in wildlife that other diagnostic tests can’t detect. In a study led by Duke University, researchers used a technique called […]

Aging is one of the most mysterious processes in biology. We don’t know, scientifically speaking, what exactly it is. We do know for sure when it ends, but to make matters even more inscrutable, the […]

Findings raise the possibility of treating blinding eye diseases using a patient’s own corrected cells as replacement tissue. Using a new technology for repairing disease genes–the much-talked-about CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing–University of Iowa researchers working together […]

A landmark study, based on genetic analysis of nearly 65,000 people, has revealed that a person’s risk of schizophrenia is increased if they inherit specific variants in a gene related to “synaptic pruning” — the […]