Sarah Zhang
‘Google of sorts’: DNA database harnesses power of genome sequences
In 2015, scientists discovered a pig in China that would set off a frantic, worldwide search. The pig carried bacteria ...
How long can bacteria live? 500-year experiment could provide answers
In the year 2514, some future scientist will arrive at the University of Edinburgh (assuming the university still exists), open ...
From salt to hand sanitizer, corn is in everything. What would life without it look like?
When Christine Robinson was first diagnosed with a corn allergy 17 years ago, she remembers thinking, “No more popcorn, no ...
DNA test for your dog? Here’s what your vet thinks about it
[T]he direct-to-dog-owner market has become bigger and more crowded: Embark, DNA My Dog, and Paw Print Genetics are just a few ...
When a DNA test uncovers an ugly family secret
As DNA-testing companies sell millions of kits, they’ve started to rearrange families. The tests have reunited long-lost cousins and helped adoptees find their ...
Personal DNA tests challenged for perpetuating ‘false notions’ of ethnic cultures and race
Genetic-ancestry tests are having a moment. Look no further than Spotify: [Last month], the music-streaming service—as in, the service used ...
Can a DNA test prove you are black? This man is suing the government to find out
In 2014, Ralph Taylor applied to have his insurance company in Washington State certified as a “disadvantaged business enterprise.” The DBE ...
Living with hemophilia: When patients with genetic disorders don’t want to be cured
Jeff Johnson is 40 years old, and for all 40 of those years, he has been living with hemophilia. The ...
When a DNA test says you aren’t exactly who you think you are
[Catherine] St Clair thought she was inquiring about a technical glitch. Her brother—the brother who along with three other siblings ...
‘War of words’ over what to call lab-grown meat exposes divide in America’s food culture
On [July 12th], in a small but packed auditorium, the FDA convened a public meeting about lab-grown meat—but you wouldn’t ...
Fueling CRISPR: The nonprofit dedicated to sharing ‘bits of useful DNA’
When Feng Zhang was a graduate student in the early 2000s, he helped make a groundbreaking discovery: Light-sensitive proteins from ...
Genetically engineered monkeys? China is using them for autism research
[MIT genetics researcher Guoping] Feng now travels to China several times a year, because there, he can pursue research he ...
CRISPR innovator Feng Zhang on treating human diseases: ‘We’re still a ways from that’
[Biologist Feng Zhang] has already made two discoveries tipped to win Nobel Prizes. The big one, the one that shot ...
Small genealogy website GEDmatch ‘never expected’ its criminal-catching use
Ever since investigators revealed that a genealogy website led police to arrest a man as California’s notorious Golden State Killer, interest ...
The future of ‘genetic genealogy’ crime solving
Just three weeks ago, law enforcement in California announced the arrest of the Golden State Killer using DNA. … On ...
Are we done bleeding horseshoe crabs for pharmaceutical use?
Contemporary humans do not deliberately kill the horseshoe crabs—as did previous centuries of farmers catching them for fertilizer or fishermen ...
Our bodies churn out trillions of mutations each day—why aren’t we ‘walking bags of cancer’?
As you read this article, the cells in your body are dividing and the DNA in them is being copied, ...
All yeast strains likely descended from common ancestor in China
When scientists in France set out to sequence 1,000 yeast genomes, they looked at strains from all the places you ...
What the humble fruit fly has taught us about human genetics
I came to First in Fly, a new book about fruit-fly research, with perhaps some special interest. In fact, a popular ...
‘White-hat hacker’ Columbia University geneticist Yaniv Erlich maps his 13-million-person family tree
Yaniv Erlich has been a white-hat hacker and a geneticist at Columbia University, and now he works for a genealogy company. This unusual ...
Ginkgo Bioworks’ mission to make GMOs fun, cool and socially conscious
Out on an old Navy dry dock, a biotech company called Ginkgo Bioworks is growing genetically modified organisms by the ...
Uptown rats? Rodents in New York City have genetically adapted to different neighborhoods
As a whole, Manhattan’s rats are genetically most similar to those from Western Europe, especially Great Britain and France. They ...
Proof the yeti exists? DNA analysis shows bone ‘samples’ came from bears
In the fall of 2013, Charlotte Lindqvist got a call from a film company making an Animal Planet documentary about ...
Dolly the sheep revisited: Early health fears about clones ‘greatly exaggerated’
[L]ast year, Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist at the University of Nottingham, published a paper about several clones including Dolly’s four “sisters,” who ...
Video: CRISPR gene editing in real time
[Researcher Osamu] Nureki’s paper was published in Nature Communications Friday, and by early morning, the video that astonished the room in [a CRISPR ...
DNA profiles of 500,000 people put online by UK Biobank in massive research effort
U.K. Biobank [recruited] 500,000 volunteers for a massive study on the origins of disease. In addition to collecting blood and urine, ...
Unapproved stem cell therapy leaves elderly women blind
[E]ye doctors based primarily at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami had published a widely covered report describing three eerily similar cases: ...
Genetically engineered natural insecticides? RNAi crops with built-in protection hit the market
DvSnf7 dsRNA is an unusual insecticide. You don’t spray it on crops. Instead, you encode instructions for manufacturing it in ...