The emotional well-being of families where children lack a genetic or gestational link to one or both of their parents – where the children have been conceived through surrogacy, egg donation or donor insemination – has long been a subject of debate.

Obesity may be caused not only by eating habits but also by genetic roots in the brain.

Scientists in London, Washington and Shenzhen on Tuesday jointly launched the 1,000 Genomes Project, which will involve sequencing the genomes of at least 1,000 people worldwide to create the most detailed and medically useful picture of human genetic variation yet.

What is the fundamental creative force behind life on Earth" It's a question that has vexed mankind for millennia, and thanks to theory and almost a year's worth of number-crunching on a supercomputer, Rice University physicist and bioengineer Michael Deem thinks he has the answer: A changing environment may organize the structure of genetic information itself.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that mice rely on a special set of proteins to recognise each other. Previous study assumed that another set of genes that influence smell in vertebrates might be used by animals that identify each other through scent.

It is better to be looked over than overlooked, Mae West supposedly said. These are words of wisdom for genome data-miners of today. Data that goes unnoticed, despite its widespread availability, can reveal extraordinary insights to the discerning eye. Such is the case of a systematic analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) of the massive backlog of microbial genome sequences from the public databases.

When the first four-legged animals sprouted fingers and toes, they took an ancient genetic recipe and simply extended the cooking time, say University of Florida scientists writing in Wednesday’s issue of the journal PLoS ONE. Even sharks — which have existed for more than half a billion years— have the recipe for fingers in their genetic cookbook — not to eat them, but to grow them.