Patents involving plants are often portrayed as a seriously negative phenomenon.  In fact, they play an important and beneficial role in the development of better and more productive…

Human embryonic stem cells still get all of the attention - a company in California might be able to do a clinical trial for an applied hESC treatment and it was in the news everywhere, but…

The nucleic and amino acids caught up in the infamous "selfish" segregation distorter (SD) saga may be just inanimate chemical compounds to most of us, but they have put on a soap opera for…

Chronic or acute liver failure can be deadly. Toxins take over, the skin turns yellow and higher brain function slows. A line of special liver cells could change that, says Neil Talbot, a…

The base pairs that hold together two pieces of RNA, the older cousin of DNA, are some of the most important molecular interactions in living cells. Many scientists believe that these base pairs were…

The health benefits of low-dose aspirin and omega-3 fatty acids in foods like flax seeds and salmon are touted frequently but the detailed mechanisms involved in their effects are not fully known. A…

If a genome is the blueprint for life, then the chief architects are  the molecular regulators of epigenetics, say Yale School of Medicine researchers. In the past 20 years, scientists have…

Researchers have discovered new subgroups of stomach cancer patients with different disease characteristics, information that could help improve the clinical management of a disease that still kills…

An animal model of recent human evolution found that a single mutation produced several traits common in East Asian people, from thicker hair to denser sweat glands. They also modeled the spread of…

Genome sequences of seven well-studied ant species give researchers a detailed look at molecular mechanisms - including what may be a basis for complex behavioral differences in two worker castes in…