Advances in the field of statistics are helping to unlock the mysteries of the human microbiome--the vast collection of microorganisms living in and on the bodies of humans, said Katherine Pollard, a statistician and biome expert, during a session today at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) in Seattle.

Early humans were the dominant cause of the extinction of a variety of species of giant beasts, new research has revealed.

After a decade's work a team led by Stanford bioengineer Christina Smolke succeeded in finding more than 20 genes from five different organisms and engineering them into the genome of... For thousands of years, people have used yeast to ferment wine, brew beer and leaven bread.

Lassa fever is endemic to West Africa. An international team of researchers has developed the largest genomic data set in the world on Lassa virus (LASV). The new genomic catalog contains nearly 200 viral genomes collected from patient samples in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as field samples from the major animal reservoir, or host, of Lassa virus--the rodent Mastomys natalensis, also called the multimammate rat. The researchers show that LASV strains cluster into four major groups based on geographic location, with three in Nigeria and one in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Although Lassa fever was first described in modern-day Nigeria in 1969, the current study also suggests that these four LASV strains originated from a common ancestral virus more than 1,000 years ago and spread across West Africa within the last several hundred years.

A ribosome (gray) creates a protein by translating the genetic code within an mRNA molecule (blue). In what appears to be an unexpected challenge to a long-accepted fact of biology, Johns Hopkins researchers say they have found that ribosomes -- the molecular machines in all cells that build proteins -- can sometimes do so even within the so-called untranslated regions of the ribbons of genetic material known as messenger RNA (mRNA).