All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ...

Genetic research does not always produce tidy answers. Sometimes it reveals traces that raise more questions than they settle ...

Artificial intelligence allows tracing the evolution of genetic control elements in the developing mammalian cerebellum. An ...

Unlike the nuclear genome, the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) is small, circular, and maternally inherited. This simplifies lineage tracing and can guide inferences of evolutionary relationships as part ...

To Shakespeare’s Hamlet we humans are “the paragon of animals”. But recent advances in genetics are suggesting that humans are far from being evolution’s greatest achievement. For example, humans have ...

Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on human genetics and evolution. Katrina Huynh UC Davis A professor ...

About sixty percent of the genomes of human beings and bananas are similar. So does that mean we are bananas? Well, no - only in a figurative sense. The regulation of gene expression is essential to ...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. Using advanced analysis based ...

A significant study has mapped the genetic complexity of Populus cathayana, an ecologically and economically valuable poplar species. By creating a detailed genome assembly and analyzing genetic ...

In five cases where vertebrates evolved monogamy, the same changes in gene expression occurred each time. In many non-monogamous species, females provide all or most of the offspring care. In ...

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution generated scientific debate and discussion not only in Darwin's own time, but for decades afterward. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the until the ...