The natural RNAi mechanism can be directed by either short interfering RNA (siRNA) or microRNA (miRNA). 1 There are four key steps in the RNAi pathway. When miRNA acts as the guide for RNAi, only a ...

For millennia, evolution has intrigued many great thinkers, prompting questions about how new traits emerge as species adapt over time. Then, attention shifted to natural selection and the inheritance ...

When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied ...

Humans love to play with their food—in fact, we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. In this episode of Crash Course Botany, we explore how we’ve learned to manipulate plant genetics, from ...

Thanks to increasingly efficient and affordable gene sequencing technologies, we can now chart our genetic blueprint in unprecedented detail. But what does each gene do? Of the roughly 20,000 genes ...

Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have created a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that helps ...

An estimated 170,000 Australians were diagnosed with cancer in 2025. Many people know the causes of cancer are partly genetic. But how do your genes, which contribute so much of what makes you you, ...

With no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, doctors have repeatedly stressed the importance of knowing your personal risk factors and doing everything you can to protect your brain as you age. In that sense ...

It depends on what your goal is. By Dana G. Smith When Dr. Nir Barzilai met the 100-year-old Helen Reichert, she was smoking a cigarette. Dr. Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research ...

Lurking within the genomes of nearly all species--including plants, fungi, and even humans--are genes that are passed from generation to generation with no clear benefit to the organism. Called ...