I love the spectacular symbiosis of my vegetable garden as harvest time approaches.   Beanstalks spiral up cornstalks, their tendrils teasing nearby tomato stems. Below, broad leaves protect ballooning squashes from the slugs that appear, seemingly from nowhere, after a rain, while providing water for passing furry creatures.   The synergism of a garden is an ancient and somewhat obvious idea. Many indigenous peoples honored the "three sisters" of corn, beans, and squash. My kids – three sisters – learned about the practice in grade school, and all recall the first meal that we grew ..read more

In 1902's Just So Stories for Little Children, British author Rudyard Kipling famously explained curiosities of the animal kingdom: How the Leopard Got His Spots, How the Camel got his Hump, How the Rhinoceros got his Skin, to name a few.   Reading Just So Stories was one of my earliest memories of thinking like a scientist. I see them in articles on animals' oddities, such as How the Tabby Got its Stripes, in which I explored a molecular explanation for fur color patterns set in the fetus, from a report in Nature Communications.   Now new research published in Nature brings the just ..read more

Biotechnology has solved many problems, from recombinant DNA and monoclonal antibody-derived drugs, to gene therapy and stem cell transplants, to RNA-based vaccines and genetically modified plants that resist diseases and pesticides.   In contrast, so-called cultivated meat has been, so far, a failure.   Joe Fassler's in-depth Opinion piece in the February 9 New York Times, The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner, digests the unrealistic expectations, shortcuts, and glitches that have stymied what he envisions as "a high-tech factory housing steel tanks as tall as apartment bui ..read more

The Food and Drug Administration just announced approval of Lenmeldy (atidarsagene autotemcel), a gene therapy to treat the neurological condition metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD). Available in Italy for three years, Lenmeldy (atidarsagene autotemcel), from Orchard Therapeutics, is groundbreaking, but comes at quite a cost – the $4.25 million price tag for the one-time infusion, and for the older siblings who contributed to developing the gene treatment, but were too sick to receive it.   An Ultrarare Neurological Condition   MLD affects the white matter in the brain, causing progr ..read more

  We can learn about life, past and present, anywhere we find DNA and determine its sequence. DNA Science has described intriguing sources of environmental DNA, aka eDNA: DNA in Strange Places: Hippo Poop, Zoo Air, and Cave Dirt and A Glimpse of the Ocean's Twilight Zone Through Environmental DNA.     Human remains also harbor bits of DNA that can reveal how people lived long ago.   A recent report in PLOS ONE analyzes DNA from an adenovirus and a herpes virus discovered in preserved feces – coprolites – from 5,500 to 7,000 years ago at an archaeological site in Japan. The ..read more

Five people treated for pituitary dwarfism decades ago with human growth hormone (hGH) pooled from cadavers have shown cognitive decline reminiscent of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Their dementia likely arose from transmission of the bits of amyloid-beta protein that lie behind Alzheimer's delivered along with the needed hormone, initiating a molecular chain reaction that led to brain effects decades later. Recombinant DNA technology has since provided a pure source of the hormone.   The cognition decline in these people is iatrogenic – caused by a medical procedure. The pooled hGH in ..read more

Every morning I pop a Pearl probiotic. I try hard not to drop it, for the tiny, slippery yellow sphere bounces, is impossible to pick up, and cats love to bat them into unreachable domains.   A probiotic is, technically speaking, a population of live microorganisms that confers health benefits on the multicellular organism that they inhabit – such as a human. Probiotics alter the bacterial, viral, and fungal milieu within and on us – our microbiomes – in ways that ease digestion, counter inflammation, strengthen the gut lining, affect brain function, and even squelch tumors.   Each P ..read more

"Enchant your loved ones with nature's lost scents, revived through biotechnology and perfume artistry."   When that popped up on Facebook, I was intrigued. So I clicked.   "Meet Invisible Woods: a clean, refreshing scent revived from extinct flower DNA," beneath an image of "origin flower" Wendlandia angustifolia.   A quick search revealed that this plant had been presumed extinct, until one popped up in a 1998 survey of its natural habitat in Tamil Nadu, India. Invisible Woods is not really "revived," but "reimagined," using clues from ancient flowers and the tools of biotechn ..read more

A few weeks ago, I noticed a surprising metric when posting my weekly DNA Science blog – at year's end, I'd hit #500!   That got me thinking. Looking back, which blog post was the most important? The answer came to me quickly – but it's not what I would have expected when I began more than a decade ago.   The Birth of DNA Science   When St. Martin's Press was about to publish my book about gene therapy in 2012, my agent urged me to start blogging. I needed to widen my audience beyond college students forced to buy my textbooks and readers of the articles I'd been cranking out si ..read more

The end-of-year FDA approval of the first CRISPR-based therapy, for sickle cell disease, came a mere dozen years after Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier introduced the technology. They shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.   CRISPR is one of the better abbreviations in genetics. It's certainly more memorable than RFLPs, GWAS, and even SNPs, so euphonious that few reports – technical or otherwise – actually use the term "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats." CRISPRs are short DNA sequences, peppered with repeats, that latch onto DNA-cutting enzymes, co ..read more