Genomics

New work raises the estimated diversity of viruses in the seas more than twelvefold and lays the groundwork for a better understanding of their impact on global nutrient cycles.

Promising efforts at disentangling the effects of genes and the environment on complicated traits may have been confounded by statistical problems.

The rainbow of pigments that animals use for blood illustrates a central truth of evolution.

New studies revise ideas about the symbiosis that gave mitochondria to cells and about whether the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes was one cell or many.

Researchers hope that the genes of a glowing squid can illuminate how animals evolved organs for beneficial bacteria.

With the help of deep learning techniques, paleoanthropologists find evidence of long-lost branches on the human family tree.

Biologists have demonstrated for the first time that a controversial genetic engineering technology works, with caveats, in mammals.

Jellyfish didn’t need novel genes to take an evolutionary leap in complexity.

Neither animal, plant, fungus nor familiar protozoan, a strange microbe that sits in its own “supra-kingdom” of life foretells incredible biodiversity yet to be discovered by new sequencing technologies.