In a way, sequencing DNA is very simple: There's a molecule, you look at it, and you write down what you find. You'd think it would be easy—and, for any one letter in the sequence, it is. The problem ...

When we think about genetic inheritance, we usually leap to DNA, the four-letter code containing the instructions for building a living organism. Scientists know that DNA encodes everything from hair ...

New technological advancements have allowed us to look at the entire human genome. The genome is the complete set of genetic information encoded in the DNA. Human DNA has around three billion letters ...

In 1995, with the Human Genome Project underway, sequencing was all the rage. Scientists working on the project cloned short fragments of the whole genome and used Sanger sequencing to determine the ...

DNA barcoding is a way to identify a species by its genetic sequence. DNA from an organism is matched to a DNA barcode, which is a short fragment of DNA from a specific gene. A DNA barcode is like a ...

Few ideas in modern biology have captured the public imagination quite like epigenetics. The promise is seductive: chemical ...

Epigenetics is the study of various heritable alterations that control gene expression without changing the DNA sequence. 1 The name epigenetics comes from the Greek prefix “epi”, which means on top ...