For decades, biology textbooks have drawn a firm line: viruses are not alive. They lack the machinery to reproduce on their ...

A global atlas mapping two key gut bacteria in infants around the world has uncovered a treasure trove of bacterial strains ...

Animals are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate. Each day, an estimated 200 species go extinct. Some of the ...

In June, 2025, the Wellcome Trust announced an ambitious £10 million UK project called the Synthetic Human Genome Project (SynHG) and claimed it “will unlock a deeper understanding of life, leading to ...

Haoyu Cheng, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical informatics and data science at Yale School of Medicine, has developed a new algorithm capable of building complete human genomes using standard ...

The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the arrival of all complex life on Earth has had an unsolved mystery at its heart. According to the theory, all plants, animals and fungi, known ...

Every living organism has its own genetic "blueprint": the source code for how it grows, functions and reproduces. This blueprint is known as a genome. When scientists sequence a genome, they identify ...

Reference genome assemblies provide a map of a species’ DNA sequence and its spatial context—that is, where along the chromosomes a specific piece of DNA sequence can be found. In the past, the ...

Eggplant is a globally important vegetable crop, yet its genetic complexity has long limited efforts to improve yield, quality, and stress resistance.

Note to editors: Multimedia, including photos of birds, the Smithsonian research and support team in the field and the Smithsonian’s collections, can be found via Dropbox here (password: b10kgenome).

Xavier Bofill De Ros receives funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is affiliated with ECUSA, an association of Spanish scientists in the USA. The first complete genome was ...