Professor Indraneel Mittra and his team show that DNA fragments from dying cells function as agents of horizontal gene transfer in mammalian cells. For decades, scientists have known that bacteria can ...

When Charles Darwin first proposed how evolution works in 1859, it seemed plausible. Tiny changes stack up over time, eventually leading a species to become something entirely different. Aside from ...

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL have analyzed ancient DNA from Borrelia recurrentis, a type of bacteria that causes relapsing fever, pinpointing when it evolved to spread through ...

Nearly every cell in the human body contains essentially the same genetic information, yet different cells activate different genes. For regulatory proteins to reach these genes, DNA must be ...

Natural selection is usually a term reserved for science textbooks and not for conversations about contemporary humans. For decades, scientists believed that human evolution had largely slowed to a ...

Scientists at the University of Vienna, Austria, have screened great ape specimens obtained from natural history museums to identify DNA viruses. This groundbreaking study provides unique insights ...

For decades, scientists have known that bacteria can exchange genetic material, in a process called horizontal gene transfer. This allows bacteria to rapidly evolve new traits, such as antibiotic ...