An international research team has extracted genome-wide ancient DNA from two 7,000-year-old mummified women buried in a Libyan rock shelter, identifying a deeply divergent human lineage that appears ...

Veronica Paulus is a former STAT intern supported by the Harvard University Institute of Politics. Complex regions of the human genome remained uncharted, even after researchers sequenced the genome ...

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 ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Researchers have used a new human reference genome, which includes many duplicated and repeat sequences left out of the original human genome draft, to identify genes that make the human brain ...

NIH funding has allowed scientists to see the DNA blueprints of human life—completely. In 2022, the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium, a group of NIH-funded scientists from research institutions around ...

Although there are striking differences between the cells that make up your eyes, kidneys, brain and toes, the DNA blueprint for these cells is essentially the same. Where do those differences come ...

A team of UK-based researchers is going where no scientist has dared to go—writing artificial human DNA from scratch. They’re hoping the project will answer fundamental questions about the human ...

Researchers disagree on the number of genes in the human genome, in part because what exactly a gene is can be difficult to determine. At the turn of the century, while awaiting the completion of the ...