Common wheat (Triticum aestivum) might seem as boring as the sliced bread it is baked into. But genetically, it is vexingly complex. Its genome is about six times as big as our own, and its genes are distributed among six sets of chromosomes (we humans have just two). In fact, the T. aestivum genome contains [...]

Engineers have invented a way to store a single rewriteable bit of data within the chromosome of a living cell—a kind of cellular switch that offers precise control over how and when genes are expressed. For three years, Jerome Bonnet, Pakpoom Subsoontorn, and Drew Endy of Stanford University tinkered with the switch in Escherichia coli [...]

Inside cells, some DNA is wound into tight packets, known as nucleosomes. Special enzymes bind to these compact packages of genetic material, helping to activate genes. But just how the crucial binding happens in three-dimensional space was unclear. "For years, the research community has been at an impasse," Frank Pugh, director of the Penn State [...]

Agriculture emerged on the human cultural scene about 10,000 years ago, spreading rapidly through Europe from the Near East to the British Isles in about 4,000 years. But did this world-changing technology get disseminated via an expanding wave of industrious farmers or through word-of-mouth among local hunter-gatherer populations? To help answer this much-debated question, researchers [...]