A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists from Israel and Ghana shows that an evolutionarily significant mutation in the human APOL1 gene arises not ...

In the children’s game telephone, a whispered phrase like “I ate a pear” can quickly become “I hate bears” as it moves down a line of players. As genes are passed down from parents to offspring, they ...

Geneticists have sought to understand the impact of genetic mutations, and what drives and maintains changes in DNA. Researchers have now reconstructed the evolution of a set of genes, and the ...

For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ordinary ...

Scientists showed that fixed mutations within a viral population most likely stem from how easy it is to acquire that mutation (i.e., mutation accessibility) rather than just its benefit. The ...

Scientists from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have identified novel mutations in bacteria that promote the evolution of high-level antibiotic resistance. The ...

A major evolutionary theory says most genetic changes don’t really matter, but new evidence suggests that’s not true. Researchers found that helpful mutations happen surprisingly often. The twist is ...

A study published in Nature Medicine found that monkeypox viruses from the current outbreak have on average 50 differences in their DNA compared to the versions from about four years earlier. That’s ...