In a quiet freshwater pond in Ibaraki Prefecture near Tokyo, researchers have pulled from the water a microscopic giant that is forcing biologists to rethink how complex life began. The newly ...

Viral DNA that is usually dismissed when sequencing the human genome could help to uncover useful information about complex ...

Scientists in Japan have discovered a previously unknown giant virus, offering new insight into this enigmatic category of viruses – and possibly also into the origins of multicellular life. The virus ...

Scientists have made the first step towards creating new species in the lab. Researchers have used artificial intelligence to ...

Ancient DNA is turning human evolution into a crime scene reconstruction, and one of the prime suspects is a herpesvirus that quietly slipped into our chromosomes and never left. By tracing this viral ...

The researchers took a “safety-first” approach. They deliberately excluded all viruses that infect humans or animals from the ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. HERVs, or human endogenous retroviruses, make up around 8% of the human genome, left behind as a result of infections that ...

A study published in Nature looks at genetic determinants of persistent Epstein-Barr virus DNA and associations with chronic conditions. Prof Lawrence Young, Virologist and Emeritus Professor of ...

A new study in the journal Human Gene Therapy indicates that DNA impurities derived from plasmid and host cell DNA are encapsulated into recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) capsids as ...

Researchers from the universities of Basel and Zurich have used a historical specimen from UZH’s Medical Collection to decode the genome of the virus responsible for the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic ...

Human DNA in its natural state inside cells (left) compared to eight hours after being infected with HSV-1 (right). The virus compacts the human genome’s size significantly and moves it towards the ...