Genetically modified animals are designed to contain the spread of pathogens. One prerequisite for the release of such organisms into the environment is that the new gene variant does not spread ...

Why can you possess traits neither of your parents have? The relationship of genotype to phenotype is rarely as simple as the dominant and recessive patterns described by Mendel. As opposed to partial ...

For female sheep, size matters. It has long been known that rams with big horns father twice as many lambs as those with small or no horns. Two years back, a team of scientists identified the gene in ...

When the cystic fibrosis (CF) gene was cloned in 1989, two radical new approaches to the management of the disease became possible. The most important was the prospect of somatic gene therapy. In this ...

Genetically modified organisms must not be allowed to spread uncontrollably. Scientists are therefore keen to take advantage of a mechanism that will localise the spread of mutants. Mutants with a ...