Science

An international team of researchers, led by Kanazawa and Kobe Universities, Japan, and the Universities of Marburg and Freiburg, Germany, has sequenced and analyzed the genome of Chara braunii, a freshwater green alga closely related to land plants. By comparing Chara’s genome to multiple land plant genomes, the scientists were …

A multinational team led by researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Univesities of Queensland and Southern California, Los Angeles, has conducted a large-scale genetic association analysis of educational attainment in a sample of approximately 1.1 million individuals and identified 1,271 genome-wide-significant genetic variants. The findings, published in the journal Nature …

An international team of scientists has successfully sequenced the genome of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes). The red fox (Vulpes vulpes). Image credit: Dia Picard. The domestic dog and the red fox are closely related species that only diverged about 10 million years ago within the family Canidae. However, these …

Modern pygmies living in a village near the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, where fossils of the dwarfed human species Homo floresiensis were discovered in 2004, appears to have evolved short stature independently, according to new research. Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis. Image credit: Elisabeth Daynes. Flores …

The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC) published this week the first fully annotated reference genome of the bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), one of the world’s most important crops. Wheat field. Image credit: Pezibear. Wheat is the most widely cultivated crop on Earth, contributing about a fifth of the total …

Neanderthals and Denisovans are extinct groups of hominins that separated from each other more than 390,000 years ago. These two groups inhabited Eurasia — Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east — until they were replaced by modern humans around 40,000 years ago. Now, a research team led …

New research from the Universities of Bristol and Bath suggests life originated on our planet a lot earlier than previously thought. An artistic conception of the early Earth. Image credit: Simone Marchi / NASA. Scientists have long sought to understand ancient life and the shared evolutionary history of life as …

An international group of scientists from Japan and Australia has identified two essential genes involved in the regulation of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The acetylcholine pathway has been proposed to be important for wakefulness and REM sleep, but genetic evidence has been missing. Using a knockout of acetylcholine receptor …

A team of researchers from Australia, China and the United Kingdom has sequenced and analyzed the genome of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), a species of flowering plant in the family Papaveraceae. This breakthrough, reported in the journal Science, reveals the origins of the genetic pathway leading to the production …

According to a large new study of twins, genetics explains more than 60% of individual differences in school achievement. Rimfeld et al use twin analyses and genome-wide polygenic score analyses of longitudinal data from the Twins Early Development Study from age 7 to age 16, including GCSE scores, to investigate …