The likelihood of adult psychiatric problems is increased by childhood trauma, particularly so in carriers of certain alleles of certain genes. I discuss here a recent paper that sheds light on the mechanism of this effect, ...

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 ...

A new approach, based on the use of peptide nucleic acid molecules to form triple helices and promote locus-specific recombination, demonstrates potential for in vivo gene correction at clinically significant levels and ...

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 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 ...

The heterogeneity of tumours is now beginning to be documented precisely by single-cell new-generation sequencing. Recently published results on breast tumours show that each of the cells analysed displays a unique pattern ...

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.