News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The current reference human genome is based on a handful of people but the new Pangenome project will incorporate DNA from hundreds of people all around the world Humans 16 March 2022 By Michael Marshall DNA sequence data Shutterstock / Gio.tto The human genome is being sequenced again – but better. A new project to … Read more
DNA sequencing has revealed that a bright pink lake on an island off Western Australia gets its colour from a mix of salt-loving bacteria and algae Earth 10 March 2022 By Alice Klein Aerial view of Lake Hillier, Australia Tourism Western Australia The unusual bubblegum pink colour of a remote lake in Western Australia has … Read more
A study of the extinct Christmas Island rat suggests we cannot bring back the woolly mammoth and other lost species without important differences Life 9 March 2022 By Michael Le Page An illustration of the Christmas Island rat Joseph Smit/Public Domain It is impossible to bring extinct animals back to life exactly as they were, … Read more
Your pet’s dinner may contain endangered shark – even if the ingredients on the label don’t explicitly include “shark”, a recent analysis of commercially produced pet foods has found. Pet foods often describe their ocean-sourced ingredients with generic terms such as “fish”, “white fish”, “white bait”, or “ocean fish” and researchers wondered if genetic … Read more
Scientists have developed a quick genetic test that can diagnose a large range of rare muscle and nerve diseases with near perfect accuracy. Tandem repeat disorders are a family of over 50 inherited diseases, including Huntington’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), that seem to occur when short DNA sequences are repeated too many times. … Read more
Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. You’re probably familiar with the concept of evolution. Living things evolve by accumulating genetic changes, which are then weeded out or preserved through a process of natural selection. Turns out the same thing happens in music. And by using the same software that’s used to … Read more
Africa is the birthplace of our species, but ancient DNA from the continent has so far provided relatively few clues to our history there, partly because researchers have struggled to recover genetic samples that survived the hot, humid climate. Now, an analysis of ancient DNA from six individuals from southeastern Africa offers a glimpse of … Read more
Cloning is the process of creating organisms that are genetically identical. These organisms are identical twins and are to some extent copies of each other. Many organisms can clone themselves, including most plants and some animals. Reproducing this way avoids the need to find a sexual partner and allows a new generation to be produced … Read more
The remnants of a virus that plagued our mammal ancestors during the age of the dinosaurs have been found lurking in our genomes Life 18 February 2022 By Michael Le Page An artist’s impression of prehistoric animals from the early Cretaceous period MARK P. WITTON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Around 106 million years ago, the DNA of … Read more
A simple test for water pollution involving engineered strands of DNA can report levels of contamination, and this biological system can carry out logical operations like those done by computers Technology 17 February 2022 By Matthew Sparkes The DNA computer – although not set up for a formal analysis Julius Lucks/Northwestern University A biological computer … Read more