Daily Human Digest
Every day, the staff of the Genetic Literacy Project scours the Web for stories on a range of human genetics issues, including gene editing, regulations and bioethics, gene therapy, epigenetics, personal genomics, evolution, ancestry and artificial intelligence. We publish excerpts of those stories and encourage our readers to visit the original publications for the complete stories.
New horizons and future directions for epigenetics
Ever since the age of Darwin — and especially since the discovery of DNA — scientists have thought of biological inheritance ...
Stem cell dysfunction may be responsible in some cases of schizophrenia
A gene long associated with schizophrenia and subsequently studied in rodent brain has now been scrutinized in human neurons. These neurons, derived ...
Genetic explanation for short stature in humans
It's not another tall tale: Evolutionary biologists have developed a new understanding of the genetic basis of short stature in ...
Human and dogs’ relationship based on dominance hierarchy
For dog lovers, comparative psychologists Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi have an unsettling conclusion. Many researchers think that as humans ...
Genome sequencing promising for curing lupus, personalized medicine
Medical researchers have used DNA sequencing to identify a gene variant responsible for causing lupus in a young patient. The ...
Interplay of genes, gender, and environment crucial to developing addiction
Studies of substance abusers have long hinted that some people are at least partially genetically predisposed to addiction. This certainly ...
Diet wars: ‘Caveman diet’ is all the rage, but ignores what our ancient ancestors really ate
Before the advances that made agriculture possible, humans ate solely what they could hunt and gather, which varied wildly depending ...
Bold new directions for synthetic biology
Armed with powerful new genetic tools and a penchant for tinkering, synthetic biologists have built a new menagerie. Photographic “E. coliroid” ...
Fossils tell of mammals’ rough road to survival
When the asteroid slammed into prehistoric Mexico and drew the curtain on the Cretaceous, dinosaurs did not fare very well. All ...
Polio strain highlights importance of strengthening vaccine effectiveness
The cause of an unusually severe outbreak of poliomyelitis that hit Congo in 2010 has been identified: a strain of ...
How much can we actually tell from a genome scan?
On August 6, researchers announced in The New England Journal of Medicine that they had found that mutations in a ...
Researchers explore genetic complexities of sex determination
Men and women differ in plenty of obvious ways, and scientists have long known that genetic differences buried deep within ...
Biochip closely mimics biological cells
Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery, but mimicking the intricate networks and dynamic interactions that are inherent ...
23andMe moves to mend fences with FDA, seeks Bloom syndrome test approval
Seven months after the FDA forced 23andMe to stop reporting health results to its customers, the personal genomics company is ...
Genetic empowerment: Extreme athlete probes own genetics to streamline diagnosis
When extreme athlete Kim Goodsell discovered that she had two extremely rare but ostensibly unrelated genetic diseases, she taught herself ...
IBM chip mimics brain, marks advancement in artificial intelligence
The human brain is the world's most sophisticated computer capable of learning new things on the fly, using very little ...
Can tobacco plant help cure Ebola?
It's an eye-catching angle in the story of an experimental treatment for Ebola: The drug comes from tobacco plants that ...
How data mining targets pregnant mothers
For me, like most potential parents, the first test I took was not genetic. Instead it was a simple pregnancy ...
Can identifying ‘suicide genes’ help predict risk?
No one could have predicted that Oscar-winning comedian Robin Williams would kill himself. Or could they? When someone commits suicide, ...
‘Subway’ map tracks journey of engineered stem cells
The differentiation of engineered stem cells may be imagined as a subway journey, where the genetic equivalents of missing a transfer or ...
Bacteria may be key to immunity, DNA manipulation
Bacteria’s ability to destroy viruses has long puzzled scientists, but researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health ...
More details on Google’s Baseline human health project
Google X’s new Baseline Project was made public in July. Although widely reported that the study would only focus on ...
When is a ‘modified organism’ a GMO?
Where is the threshold between natural "involvement" and unnatural "interference" when using technology to improve our food? ...
Should Myriad make breast cancer data available for clinical research?
Myriad Genetics may have lost its singular hold on the market for BRCA1 and BRCA2 testing in May 2013 when ...
Scientists apply century-old technique to shrink tumors using bacteria
Inspired by hundred-year-old accounts of how bacterial infections coincided with cancer remissions, scientists have shown that injections of a weakened bacterium — Clostridium ...
Are we puppets of our own gut bacteria?
Your body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes, collectively known as your microbiome. Naturalists first became aware ...
New therapy advances lung cancer treatment, personalized medicine
Small RNA molecules, including microRNAs (miRNAs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), offer tremendous potential as new therapeutic agents to inhibit ...
