Analysing the data recently presented by Jiankui He and assuming that it is authentic shows that the goal of abolishing the expression of CCR5 may have been reached for one of the resulting twins, although this remains to ...

Careful GWAS analysis of a group of mixed-ancestry Latino-American individuals reveals the role of a new “light” variant of the MSFD12 gene which appears to originate in some of the ...

The synthesis of four new nucleotide analogues that can form hydrogen bonds within the DNA double helix and can be incorporated without distortion of the structure extends the possibilities of synthetic biology. Although ...

The planned acquisition of Pacific Biosciences by Illumina could signal a big change in the DNA sequencing landscape, and provides the incentive for an update on a field that still has a number of players and could be ...

A newly developed technique allows the analysis of gene expression within tissues at near-cellular resolution. This opens a whole range of applications and will be a major ingredient of future studies.

Inactivation of the CCR5 gene by CRISPR editing in human embryos, as recently attempted in China, was touted as a positive change for the babies involved since it was expected to ...

The concept of precision oncology is straightforward, but the actual results of treating advanced cancer patients with the targeted drug suggested by genomic analysis have been generally disappointing, indicating that this ...

Bacteriophages were advocated as therapeutic agents more than a century ago, but the advent of antibiotics relegated them to a very minor role. Today, multi-drug resistant bacteria are a serious health problem, and phage ...

Careful sequencing studies on small samples of normal oesophageal epithelium reveal the presence of very abundant cellular clones harbouring mutations in known cancer genes (and elsewhere). The number and size of these ...