March is Women’s History Month, dedicated to celebrate the accomplishments of women and the progress towards gender equality. International Women’s Day is March 8th, and this year’s theme is “#ChooseToChallenge”.…
Continue ReadingAlex Stutzman of UNC-CH (unexpectedly and unintentionally) became the founder of #BlackinGenetics on Twitter, which took over the week of August 17-23rd, 2020. The SWAC Executive Board Interviewed Alex, a…
Continue ReadingMust we suffer fools who would pervert objective scientific findings into divisive weapons? This geneticist-in-training is about to find out!
Continue ReadingThe genetics behind how cats develop their coat patterns.
Continue ReadingScientists identified over 100 genes that may be associated with snoring.
Continue ReadingWhat classifies an organism as living? New classes of viruses may blur the line between what is living and what is not.
Continue ReadingHow hard is it to remodel your epigenome? Here’s a report of my attempt to do so using inspiration from honey bees.
Continue ReadingWhat makes humans more complex than plants or bacteria? Surprisingly, it’s not how much DNA we have, but rather how much of our DNA doesn’t encode for protein – known as the non-coding genome.
Continue ReadingWe eat (or drink) them all the time, but what about in the lab? For scientists, yeast has been an invaluable tool for making biological discoveries.
Continue ReadingImagine a future in which we can edit genes like a sentence in Microsoft Word. We could highlight, delete, and correct a section of a gene known to cause disease,…
Continue ReadingEarwax stickiness. Neanderthal ancestry. Caffeine metabolism. Tasting soap when you eat cilantro. Direct-to-consumer genotyping companies like 23andme boast this kind of information in exchange for a tube of your finest…
Continue ReadingHurricane Florence was devastating to much of the Carolinas. The flooding that ensued destroyed not only homes and livelihoods, but greatly affected animal agriculture. The effects of Florence resulted in…
Continue ReadingWhen most people think about “Finding Nemo,” they likely think about Nemo, the adventurous young clownfish who got caught up in a fishy situation (no pun intended) and ended up…
Continue ReadingIf you wanted to get a genetically modified organism (GMO) through the regulatory process, you can expect to dish out about $35.1 million and wait at least five and a half…
Continue Reading“Listen. Understand. The Terminator is out there. It can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be bargained with… it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear…and it will absolutely not stop.…
Continue ReadingThe Human Genome Project (HGP) was an amazing endeavor to map the full human genome, and so intense an effort that it required an international collaborative research team. One of…
Continue ReadingCloned primates are here! Over three decades have passed since the birth of Dolly, the sheep, scientists have now tackled cloning mammals that are even closer to us on the evolutionary…
Continue ReadingLet’s start at the very beginning. When a mammalian egg is successfully fertilized by a single sperm, the result is a single cell called a zygote. A zygote has the…
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