GENOMIC manipulation, whether due to its connotations of ‘futuristic mad scientist’ or what appears as sheer complexity of patterns of heredity, is consistently associated with words such as ‘dangerous’ and ‘worrying’. However, since 2013, a new technique called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or more simply known by the acronym CRISPR, has turned up […]
genetics
Designer Genes
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has given a free pass to a DNA editing tool to alter the human genome. This opens the way to unprecedented control over the human genome, and the possibility to prevent, or even cure, genetic diseases. Back in 2012 Professor Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues were spending long hours […]
2017 Science – A Sneak Peek
Evading Extinction Unless you were a Trump-loving, music despising animal hater, 2016 had something to upset pretty much everyone. And as news broke that current mass extinction will be the greatest since the extinction of the dinosaurs, it was up to 2017 to make us feel a little better about the state of environmental affairs. […]
The fall of the Neanderthal
The history of human evolution is a long and fascinating one. In this issue we look at one of our closest evolutionary cousins, the infamous Homo Neanderthalensis, more commonly known as Neanderthals. But how much do we know about Neanderthals and just how closely related are we? Neanderthals were an ancient species of Hominid, commonly recognised […]
Uni research reveals new wildlife camouflage techniques
New research from the University of Exeter has made an exciting revelation about wildlife camouflage techniques. According to the findings, Wild Aegean wall lizards found on Greek islands choose rocks that best match the colour of their backs, raising the question of how lizards know what colour their backs are. Dr Martin Stevens from the […]
Ancient Irish genome answers question of migration
Geneticists at Trinity College Dublin have been the first to sequence genomes from ancient Irish humans, revealing deep new insights into Irish genetic heritage and migratory origins. The team used the DNA from an early farmer woman, who lived near Belfast some 5,200 years ago, and from three Bronze Age men who were alive 4,000 years ago. From this […]
Exeter academics make world’s best list
Six academics from the University of Exeter have earned a place on a prestigious list of the world’s most influential minds, which was published earlier this week. Inclusion on the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list, which spans natural, biomedical and social sciences, represents a researcher’s ranking within the global top 1 per cent. Three […]
The summer highlights: Pills to Pluto
Cranial Creation Let’s open with a whopper: Last August, for the first time ever in human history, geneticists created an almost fully-formed human brain. The manufactured mind is reported to be about the size of the rubber on the end of a pencil, and is equivalent to the developing brain of a five-week-old foetus in the […]
TB or not TB?
The Geoffrey Pope building has been alive and kicking all throughout summer, with the sound of keen students busily working on their project for iGEM 2015. The international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation runs an annual competition wherein teams from universities around the world spend the summer on a project in synthetic biology. I caught […]