Repeats are key to understanding humanity's genome

It was like a map of New York missing all of Manhattan. The human reference genome finally has all its blank spots filled in, and seeing everything we missed the first time around is both repetitive—and enlightening.

Scientists discover when beetles became prolific

Using a previously published and carefully curated 68-gene dataset, the scientists ran a battery of mathematical models to reconstruct the evolution of protein sequences—the results of which, have been published today in ...

Endless forms most beautiful: Why evolution favours symmetry

From sunflowers to starfish, symmetry appears everywhere in biology. This isn't just true for body plans—the molecular machines keeping our cells alive are also strikingly symmetric. But why? Does evolution have a built-in ...

Answering a century-old question on the origins of life

The missing link isn't a not-yet-discovered fossil, after all. It's a tiny, self-replicating globule called a coacervate droplet, developed by two researchers in Japan to represent the evolution of chemistry into biology.

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