The synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome comprising only 473 genes is an impressive achievement, yet it is only a step towards a really synthetic genome based on first principles: this set of genes was derived from a ...

The recent development of a powerful and flexible genome editing technique (the CRISP-cas9 method) accelerates tremendously the production of animal models and will significantly enhance the perspectives of (somatic) gene ...

GWAS analysis of severe Covid patients implicates a major locus on chromosome 3. The corresponding 50 kb segment appears to originate from Neanderthal/Sapiens crossings, raising interesting evolutionary questions.

GWAS analyses for skin colour performed on a series of diverse African groups reveal new loci involved in this phenotype and, surprisingly, the presence within several African populations of the “light” allele of the SLC24A5 ...

Recently, a systematic (but limited) search for rare variants implicated in adult height, a highly polygenic trait, has uncovered a number of new variants for which the effect size is inversely correlated with the minor ...

The SEER site set up by the NCI provides an opportunity to generate ad hoc graphs of cancer statistics over the last forty years, makes it possible to examine commonly held assumptions such as a “cancer epidemic” and allows ...