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.

A new genetic study focussing on the degree of violence in criminals and using both candidate gene and GWAS approaches finds statistically significant associations of extreme violent behaviour with low activity alleles of ...

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 ...

Life expectancy curves for several nations provide an astonishingly precise image of the major events that occurred during the last century, highlight similarities between France and Great Britain, and reflect the tremendous ...

The first therapy based on chimeric antigen receptors has been approved by the FDA. It gives excellent results in recurrent paediatric ALL; its cost is very high but fairly consistent with the clinical benefit (long term ...

Very large-scale GWAS analyses confirm the genetic complexity of schizophrenia and provide some new leads to understand the etiology of the condition.