La estadounidense Colossal dice haber desarrollado una plataforma de incubación fuera de la cáscara biológica que permitiría devolver a la vida al moa gigante, un ave de Nueva Zelanda extinta hace 600...

Cryo-electron microscopy and massively parallel assays shed light on the mechanism by which DICER, a key enzyme in the RNase III family, cleaves RNA at precise locations to produce small RNAs.

The analysis of ancient DNA (aDNA) has gained considerable momentum over the past decade , allowing the study of extinct or extant genomes from organisms that lived up to 2.5 million years ago. This h...

Abstract. Sorex araneus, the Eurasian common shrew, has seasonal brain size plasticity (Dehnel's phenomenon) and many intraspecific chromosomal rearrangeme

Ancient DNA has become a workhorse for evolutionary biologists. In contrast, ancient RNA studies have been rare and often methodologically controversial. Mármol-Sánchez et al. provide compelling evide...

Scientists successfully sequence the RNA from woolly mammoths found in Siberia that lived up between 10,000 thousand and 50,000 years ago.

Li et al. apply base-pair resolution Micro Capture-C ultra to map chromatin contacts between individual motifs within cis-regulatory elements and reveal a unified model of biophysically mediated enhan...

Abstract. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) associate with Argonaute (AGO) proteins to serve as guides, directing binding to partially complementary sites in mRNAs, ultim

Scientists are hunting for ancient RNA in Svalbard’s permafrost, hoping to shed light on the evolution of viral diseases

Background MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a type of small non-coding RNAs involved in the post-transcriptional repression of target mRNA transcripts, and responsible for the fine-tuning of numerous molecular ...

Complex diseases driven by gene-environment interactions impose a heavy burden on human and animal health. Addressing these challenges requires innovative research. The emerging field of historical epigenomics offers a promising opportunity to link genotypes with phenotypes using preserved biological material. New methods such as historical chromatin profiling in museum specimens provide valuable insights into vertebrate genome regulation. Building on successful work with formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples, we expect growing interest in using historical specimens for biomedical, evolutionary, and ecological research. Applied to historical collections, these tools can provide critical baselines for understanding modern diseases, environmental stressors, and human adaptation.

Dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus) are extinct predators of Pleistocene North America. Although phenotypically similar to living wolves (Canis lupus), dire wolves have yet to be placed confidently in the ca...

ALT: a silhouette of a person looking out over a body of water at sunset

ALT: a cartoon character with the number 9 on his back sits in front of a sunset over the ocean

The authors show that DNA methylation patterns in one tissue can inform on those in another, under certain conditions, and devise an algorithm that allows identification of differential DNA methylatio...

All cells must fold their chromosomes. The combined action of a small set of conserved molecular and biophysical mechanisms fold chromosomes in a variety of ways across the cell cycle and tree of life...

In this Review, Chen and Kim explore the exciting journey of discovering small and long non-coding RNAs. They also explain the current understanding as to how these RNAs are made, how they operate, an...

Genetic sequences from a museum specimen offer fresh clues about the physiology of thylacines, which went extinct in the 1930s.