News by Subject Biology

Hikmet Budak, Winifred Asbjornson Plant Sciences Chair, is one of 200 international scientists who co-published an article this week detailing the description of the genome of bread wheat. The implications of the publication include greater food security.

A University of Montana researcher has discovered that mountain pine beetles may avoid certain trees within a population they normally would kill due to genetics in the trees.

Researchers from the George Washington University published an article in Trends in Parasitology outlining their lessons learned while creating vaccine candidates for hookworm and schistosomiasis.

In a new study in cells, University of Illinois researchers have adapted CRISPR gene-editing technology to cause the cell's internal machinery to skip over a small portion of a gene when transcribing it into a template for protein building. Such targeted editing could one day be useful for treating genetic diseases caused by mutations in the genome, such as Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, Huntington's disease or some cancers.

Increasing the amount of protein in the diet may reduce the liver's fat content and lower the risk of diabetes in people with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The study is published ahead of print in the American Journal of Physiology--Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Autoimmunity plays a role in the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a study led by Georgia State University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center that analyzed human genome information stored in Vanderbilt's DNA biobank.

Novel research optimizes both elasticity and rigidity in the same material without the usual tradeoffs