Interviews with Scientists

Move over Kim Kardashian, because our gene of the month is the curvaceous Callipyge, Greek for “beautiful buttocks”. It...

Finally, keep your hair on, because our gene of the month is the rather wackily-named Lunatic Fringe. First discovered...

If you ask most people what they think of when they hear the words “Sonic Hedgehog”, they’ll probably describe a spiky...

We’ve already heard how genes control the growth of an organism from single fertilised cell. But how do we know when to...

A story that starts with 9,000 placentas floating in plastic buckets of formaldehyde...

Sequencing stickleback genomes reveals similarities in adaptation...

A new paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics, talks about a Copernican revolution in how we view where we...

Researchers in America have looked at about 600 families who’ve got people with autism in the family, and they found...

For me, one of the most amazing things in biology is how a single fertilised egg cell can grow into a whole organism,...

Dr Tanya Whitfield and her team at the University of Sheffield are using a rather different model - stripey little...

Now it’s time to take a look at a couple more supermodels from the genetics world - starting with plants. Here’s Sean...

This is a little bit sad because it’s the kind of crushing of an urban legend. People did use to think that pigeons...

Another nice bee story that I noticed in the journal Genes, Brains and Behaviour and this is from researchers at...

This is about giant bees in China and this was published in PLoS One. They're actually looking at isolated...

This story's about an animal that's already become extinct, the Tasmanian tiger. This is research that'...

What we’re looking at here is how did polar bears evolve to be different from normal bears – brown bears, all kinds of...

When you think of super-models, you may think of skinny beauties strutting up the catwalk. But one of stars on the...

So they were looking at DNA from ancient cow ancestral fossils from Iran, in fact...

And another story that hit the headlines, the USB-sized gene sequencer. And I think people just went nuts for this. ...

Now they’ve sequenced the human genome, they’re trying to move on to sequencing all the bugs in our gut...

Another story that I noticed involving dogs and their diseases is about epilepsy. And actually a quite number of...

This is about dogs and Epstein-Barr virus, which is type of virus that can cause some types of cancer. And it can also...

One of the biggest genetics stories this month came from the world of cancer research. Writing in the New England...

Back in 1973, Theodosius Dobzhansky published an essay titled “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of...