A study has traced thousands of conserved regulatory elements back 300 million years, revealing deep principles of plant ...

Research is shaking up how we think about evolution, suggesting there's a level of predictability influenced by genes and genetic history.

From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

Wild scarlet monkeyflowers in California survived a historic drought by relying on a rapid evolution, marking the first time the process has been observed in the wild.

The Amazon molly reproduces without sex. A genomic copy-and-paste trick called gene conversion may explain how it avoids evolutionary meltdown.

Olfactory receptor (OR) genes, representing the largest multigene family in mammalian genomes, have undergone extensive evolutionary modifications characterised by dynamic patterns of gene duplication ...

De novo gene evolution describes the process by which entirely new genes originate from previously non-coding DNA rather than from the duplication and divergence of existing genetic material. This ...

New research from the University of St Andrews has discovered a crucial piece in the puzzle of how all animals with a spine—including all mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians—evolved. In a paper ...

Findings suggest that new genes can form by repurposing fragments of ancestral genes while incorporating entirely new coding regions (the protein-coding parts of the DNA). This innovative concept ...

In Lake Malawi, hundreds of species of cichlid fish have evolved with astonishing speed, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study how biodiversity arises.

The evolution of new genes is not the only way for a species to change. The loss of genes may also lead to adaptations that help species survive, but this idea has not been well studied. Now, ...

Comparing those sequences revealed accelerated evolution near a gene called Emx2. "What's interesting is that the sequence of the gene itself doesn't seem to be where the most relevant changes are ...