Studying the genome of thale cress, a small flowering weed, led to a new understanding about DNA mutations. (Pádraic Flood) A simple roadside weed may hold the key to understanding and predicting DNA ...

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists from Israel and Ghana shows that an evolutionarily significant mutation in the human APOL1 gene arises not ...

For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ordinary ...

An unprecedented amount of genomic sequence data is accumulating in real-time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 1.2 million sequences of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) ...

A study published in Nature Medicine found that monkeypox viruses from the current outbreak have on average 50 differences in their DNA compared to the versions from about four years earlier. That’s ...

Mutation: it’s the raw material for evolution. That makes knowing the rate at which it occurs crucial to the study of evolutionary biology. Mutation rate figures into all kinds of calculations. For ...

Many scientific discoveries are serendipitous—the result of chance. Seeing evolution in action in a cheese cave turned out to be exactly that for Benjamin Wolfe, associate professor of biology, and ...

Thirteen of Omicron’s mutations should have hurt the variant’s chances of survival. Instead, they worked together to make it thrive. By Carl Zimmer As nurses and doctors struggle with a ...

Researchers have found that DNA mutations are not random. This changes our understanding of evolution and could one day help researchers breed better crops or even help humans fight cancer. A simple ...