To the average life-science researcher, a mouse’s genetic background may be an afterthought, if even a thought, at all. A researcher’s top priorities may be to understand disease, to publish, and to ...

Genetic drift describes random fluctuations in the numbers of gene variants in a population. Genetic drift takes place when the occurrence of variant forms of a gene, called alleles, increases and ...

Chaotic genetic patchiness denotes unexpected patterns of genetic differentiation that are observed at a fine scale and are not stable in time. These patterns have been described in marine species ...

In natural populations, the mechanisms of evolution do not act in isolation. This is crucially important to conservation geneticists, who grapple with the implications of these evolutionary processes ...

Urbanization is a global phenomenon with profound effects on the ecology and evolution of organisms. We examined the relative roles of natural selection, genetic drift and gene flow in influencing the ...

In a recent study posted to the bioRxiv* preprint server, researchers developed and validated an approach for the joint inference of measurement noise and genetic drift by analyzing time-series data ...

After 5-10 generations of inbreeding, mouse colonies should be “refreshed”, to remove or prevent genetic drift accumulation in the colony. Several methods to refresh the genetic background may include ...

Studies of island bird populations have taught us a lot about evolution, but it's hard to catch birds in the act of naturally colonizing new islands. Instead, a new study from The Auk: Ornithological ...

Eastern Pennsylvania is home to beautiful farmlands and countryside, but it's also a gold mine of information for geneticists, who have studied the region's Amish culture for decades. Because of their ...

Scientists have discovered several genetic variants that protect Europeans from the bubonic plague — but also increase the risk of immune disorders. By Carl Zimmer Many Europeans carry genetic ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Scientists have identified a new member on the genetic family tree of an endangered pupfish native to south-central New Mexico. “We went into this thinking that there was one ...