Dr Pontus Skoglund, winner of this year’s Balfour Lecture for early career researchers, uses ancient DNA to unlock the secrets of human evolution, old diseases and population migration.
Dr Louisa Zoliewski was awarded the inaugural Bruce Cattanach prize for her PhD thesis on the genetics of fat distribution. She tells us how her skills and knowledge have led her to a career in genetic toxicology within the biotech industry.
We delve into the history of the war of ideas between Weldon and Bateson, and its knock-on impact on the science of heredity all the way through the 20th century to today
Most genetic alterations linked to disease aren’t in genes but are in the ‘dark genome’. Nucleome is using new technology to shine a light in these unknown depths and find the hidden genetic connections to disease.
UK Biobank has made half a million whole genome sequences available for research - so what can we learn from them?
If less than two per cent of your genome is actual genes, then what’s the rest? Is it just junk?
Author Rebecca Coffey chats about wasp facial recognition genes, how yeast epigenetics explain the Dutch Hunger Winter and a dinner party tale of spider cannibalism.
Professor Carrie Partch is researching what happens when circadian rhythm genes go wrong and whether we can create drugs for jet lag.
We chat with Dr Priya Crosby who is interested in how circadian rhythms work at the cellular level, and how molecules can tell the time.
While most of an organism’s DNA is packaged into chromosomes, that’s not the whole story.
Some organisms don’t stick with the genome they’ve got they alter it along the way through programmed chromosome elimination and genome editing.
Giles Oldroyd is finding out how plants can provide their own fertiliser with a little help from specialist microbes like fungi and bacteria.
Caroline Dean has devoted her research career to understanding how plants sense and respond to the changing of the seasons.
Professor Jim Costa, author of ‘Radical by Nature’, tells us about the extraordinary life of Alfred Russel Wallace and how this Victorian naturalist shaped our views on evolution.
We discover how Touchlight’s method for making DNA could transform the production of nucleic acid vaccines.