Meet an Edinburgh PhD candidate tracking the pandemic’s mutations… A group of students at the University of Edinburgh are in the vanguard of the microscopic war against Covid-19, trying to head off its myriad mutations and give advance warning if the virus evolves into more contagious forms. It was these students who helped to find […]
DNA testing is in fashion right now, most recently in the headlines because the documentary ‘Ant and Dec’s DNA Journey’ revealed that the legendary TV presenters are in fact distant cousins, and they both descend from the Vikings. The biggest brands of mail-in DNA kits, such as 23andMe, offer details about your ethnicity and family […]
Pitiful science reporting is wrong: astronaut Scott Kelly’s DNA is not 7 per cent different from that of his identical twin. Multiple articles asserted this, although it is basically impossible, as humans share around 99.9 per cent of our DNA with each other, 98 per cent with chimpanzees – and even share around 90 per […]
Being only announced five years ago, CRISPR-Cas9 still feels like a revolutionary new technique – but the next generation of CRISPR-Cas9 technology has already been created. A team of scientists from the Broad Institute, the USA, headed by David Liu, have recently published research in Nature detailing their next step in CRISPR-Cas9 technologies; their attempt […]
In 2003 a significant breakthrough was announced. The Human Genome Project (HGP) had successfully read the entire genetic code of a human being, comprising 20,000 or so genes and the DNA in between. The HGP was a huge international collaboration, with the UK at the forefront, following in the footsteps of other British scientists who […]
Recent research undertaken by UK academics provides new evidence that smoking during pregnancy carries significant health risks for the baby. Dr Amanda Drake, based at Edinburgh University’s Centre for Cardiovascular Science, along with researchers from the Universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Nottingham, have detected chemical changes in the DNA of foetuses as early as 12 […]