The elimination of some senescent cells by « senolytic » compounds can greatly improve the health of aged mice and in some cases reverse the effects of aging. Using a microbial exposure system that closely models coronavirus ...

New approaches allow precise measurement of somatic mutations in tissues. Applied to a diverse set of mammals, these methods show that somatic mutation load increases with age (as expected) but reaches similar levels near ...

It is commonly believed that a dog’s breed predicts its behaviour. A 2019 paper seemed to confirm this, but had some serious limitations. An extensive new study shows that, in fact, breed is not a good predictor of behaviour ...

Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria (acute premature aging) is caused by a de novo point mutation in the lamin A gene. Recently, this mutation has been accurately corrected by base editing in patient cell lines and in a mouse ...

Reports of a mammoth cloning project on-going under George Church’s supervision appear periodically in the press. Close examination of the available evidence indicates that there is indeed such a project (carried out in a ...

The most significant polymorphism associated with dog size occurs in the region of the IGF1 gene and concerns a single base change in a neighbouring lncRNA. The “small” (C) ...

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.

Sophisticated analyses of current human populations compared to a high-coverage Neandertal genome sequence indicate that, contrary to the previous consensus, African genomes carry a small but significant amount of ...

Mutations in the germline are an essential component of evolution. Current DNA sequencing systems allow quantification of these mutations through full genome sequencing of father/mother/child trios. A recent paper reports ...