genetics – Quanta Magazine

Tight-Knit Microbes Live Together to Make a Vital Nutrient

Dan Samorodnitsky — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 13:55:59 +0000

Nitrogen is fundamental to all life on Earth. Organisms use it to make amino acids and nucleic acids — the building blocks of proteins and DNA — among other vital molecules. Luckily, four-fifths of the atmosphere is nitrogen. Unluckily, in gaseous form it is inert and biologically unavailable: Every nitrogen atom is locked to another with a triple bond, which takes an extraordinary amount of...

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A Multitalented Scientist Seeks the Origins of Multicellularity

Claudia Dreifus — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:16:55 +0000

In Cassandra Extavour’s office at Harvard University hangs a placard with a painted rainbow flag and a friendly invitation. “You are welcome here,” it reads. “I have it up because I think it’s important to let people see your identities, especially when those identities are not well represented,” explained Extavour, an evolutionary geneticist who in 2014 became the first Black woman to win tenure...

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Plants Find Light Using Gaps Between Their Cells

Asher Elbein — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 15:10:45 +0000

On a shelf lined with terra cotta pots, herbs bend their stems toward the nearest window. In a field of golden wildflowers, leaves rotate with the path of the sun. In a dappled forest, vines twine up trees, reaching ever upward and away from the dark. Since ancient times, plants’ ability to orient their eyeless bodies toward the nearest, brightest source of light — known today as phototropism...

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The New Quest to Control Evolution

C. Brandon Ogbunu — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 15:17:36 +0000

Evolution is a complicated thing. Much of modern evolutionary biology seeks to reconcile the seeming randomness of the forces behind the process — how mutations occur, for example — with the fundamental principles that apply across the biosphere. Generations of biologists have hoped to comprehend evolution’s rhyme and reason enough to be able to predict how it happens. But while prediction remains...

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How Genetic Surprises Complicate the Old Doctrine of DNA

C. Brandon Ogbunu — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 14:39:31 +0000

Does an unseen force lurk within genetics? Biologists have made enormous strides over the past 100 years in understanding the role of the millions of parcels that convey our genetic information — DNA, RNA and proteins. But they have also learned about undetectable interactions between these biochemical agents, hiding in their midst like ghosts in the machine, complicating our quest to learn the...

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