Then along came Variant Bio, whose mission it is “to leverage the power of human genetic diversity to develop life-saving therapies.” As far as I could tell, it was — and remains to this day — a real outlier in the biopharma world. From the moment it was founded, le...
Before we explore the world of evolution, it’s important to set the scene by defining some key terms. Phylogenetics is a detective’s toolkit for discovering the family tree of living things, working out who’s related and how. Most commonly, genes serve as the first breadcrumps for ...
Genome assembly is an essential step in the analysis of genomic data, allowing researchers to reconstruct the complete DNA sequence of an organism from short sequences called “reads” produced by DNA sequencing technologies. SPAdes (St. Petersburg genome assembler) is a popular open-sourc...
I get asked this question a lot. How big is our genetic code? You know… that DNA blueprint thing… consisting of billions of letters… A’s, G’s, C’s, T’s… present in all of the TRILLIONS of cells in the human body… the thing that mak...
Gene editing stands at the forefront of scientific revolution, offering the unprecedented ability to make precise alterations to the DNA of living organisms. This cutting-edge technology enables scientists to add, remove, or alter genetic material at particular locations in the genome, opening up po...
