Over the past 12,000 years, humans in Europe have dramatically increased their ability to digest carbohydrates, expanding the number of genes they have for enzymes that break down starch from an ...

Fred Sanger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980 for the discovery of dideoxynucleotide sequencing of DNA, merely 3 years after a description of the technique was published 1. In the ...

Robertsonian chromosomes (ROB) are a type of structurally variant chromosome that is created when two chromosomes fuse together to form an unusual bond. Found commonly in nature, these chromosomes are ...

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 new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

Compared to other primates, humans have evolved dramatic changes to cognitive and social behaviors. However, little is known about the molecular, cellular and circuit-level modifications in the human ...

Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.

Looks can be deceiving -- Many trees in the forest : the DNA quest to find our closest ape relative -- The great divorce : how and when did humans and chimpanzees part ways? -- A population crash in ...

Scientists have suspected that modern humans have more genes to digest starch than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but the amylase locus of the genome is hard to study. Researchers have now developed ...

When humans domesticated grains some 12,000 years ago, natural selection began to favor genomes with extra genes encoding for the enzyme amylase, which converts starch to sugar. These extra genes ...