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 ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

A Harvard-led study of nearly 16,000 ancient genomes from West Eurasia reveals that natural selection has been far more active in the past 10,000 years than previously believed. Researchers identified ...

The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of biology. They carry genetic material, but they cannot make proteins on ...

Cyanobacteria—ancient microbes that oxygenated Earth and made complex life possible—are still revealing surprises billions of years later. Scientists have now discovered that a molecular system once ...

A system once tied to DNA organization in cyanobacteria has evolved into a structure that shapes the cell itself. This shift ...

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 ...

Butterflies and a moth species reused the same two genes, ivory and optix, to create similar warning colors over millions of ...

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 ...

A series of recent studies using unprecedented ancient DNA datasets have revealed that human evolution is far more complex and recent than previously thought. Findings challenge the idea of a single ...