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.
All in Microbes
Louisa Zoliewski: From chubby mice to everyday toxins
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.
Inside HIV: The genetic story of the AIDS epidemic
From the beginning of the AIDS crisis to the possible end of HIV, we’re looking at the genetic story of this unusual retrovirus 40 years after it was first discovered.
Rebecca Coffey: Evolutionary tales and Just So Stories
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.
Antony Dodd: Manipulating malaria by changing the clocks
All sorts of organisms have circadian rhythms, and Professor Antony Dodd is using our knowledge of clock genes to target malaria and herbicide use
Going round in circles: The story of extrachromosomal DNA
While most of an organism’s DNA is packaged into chromosomes, that’s not the whole story.
Nature’s genetic engineers
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: Go fertilise yourself
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: Winter is coming
Caroline Dean has devoted her research career to understanding how plants sense and respond to the changing of the seasons.
John Tregoning: How nucleic acid vaccines can protect us from infectious disease
We look at the science behind DNA and RNA vaccines, and how they can keep us safe from infections like COVID19 and more.
Lucy van Dorp: Tracking SARS-CoV-2 around the world, from animals to humans and back again
At the beginning of 2020, UCL group leader Lucy van Dorp set to work using her genetic analysis skills to track the SARS-CoV-2 virus as it spread and mutated in animals as well as humans, providing vital insights to help us understand and tackle the pandemic.
Kadeem Gilbert: life in a death trap
Dr Kadeem Gilbert is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Michegan State University who has been researching the pool of digestive juices. And it turns out that it’s not only a place where insects drown and get digested by the pitcher plant, it’s also home to a whole community of living things that are able to survive despite the harsh conditions.
Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel: the genesis of The Genesis Machine
Kat Arney interviews authors Amy Webb, who spends her time digging into the technologies that are changing the world, and Andrew Hessel, a geneticist who comes from the frontiers of genomic science, about their new book The Genesis Machine.
When it comes to advances in genetics tech, what’s actually possible, versus scaremongering science fiction? What’s coming fast down the pipeline that we need to know and think about? And how - and who - decides how this stuff should be regulated?
Jamie Foster: squids in space
Professor Jamie Foster is sending glow-in-the-dark squid into space to find out more about their microbiome.
Meet the Borg
Giant DNA elements enable microbes to assimilate genes from other species
How do mRNA vaccines work?
If you can make an mRNA and you can get it into a cell, then the ribosomes in that cell will make whatever protein that mRNA encodes. And it’s here that we move from the 1960s right up to today, and to the story of mRNA vaccines.
Moving in together - How the theory of endosymbiosis changed biology
The diversity and success of life on this planet may be the result of cells buddying up and moving in together, combining their resources to create new organisms with advantageous new skills.
Powder puffs and plasmids - Esther Lederberg
A tale of two Lederberg: Esther’s work on viruses led to a Nobel for her husband, while she struggled to get tenure.
Nobel viruses
It may sound strange, but a chicken virus has won three Nobel prizes. Not bad work for a tiny bag of genes loitering on the edge of life.