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Researchers have identified the role that a four-stranded version of DNA may play in the role of cancer progression, and suggest that it may be used to develop new targeted cancer therapies.

Darwin’s stuffed pigeons, the letter which first coined the term ‘genetics’ and a paper by Crick and Watson which helped decode DNA all feature in the latest film to celebrate Cambridge ̽»¨Ö±²¥ Library’s 600th anniversary. 

Daphne Martschenko (Faculty of Education) discusses whether DNA can predict our educational achievement.

̽»¨Ö±²¥process by which a mother’s diet during pregnancy can permanently affect her offspring’s attributes, such as weight, could be strongly influenced by genetic variation in an unexpected part of the genome, according to research published today. ̽»¨Ö±²¥discovery could shed light on why many human genetic studies have previously not been able to fully explain how certain diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and obesity, are inherited.

An international collaboration of researchers has identified five new gene regions that increase a woman’s risk of developing endometrial cancer, one of the most common cancers to affect women, taking the number of known gene regions associated with the disease to nine.

Genetic tests that provide an estimate of an individual’s risk of developing diseases such as lung cancer and heart disease do not appear to motivate a change in behaviour to reduce the risk, according to a study led by the ̽»¨Ö±²¥ of Cambridge and published in ̽»¨Ö±²¥BMJ today.

Some of the world’s most valuable books and manuscripts – texts which have altered the very fabric of our understanding – will go on display in Cambridge this week as Cambridge ̽»¨Ö±²¥ Library celebrates its 600th birthday with a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of its greatest treasures.

̽»¨Ö±²¥world of epigenetics – where molecular ‘switches’ attached to DNA turn genes on and off – has just got bigger with the discovery by a team of scientists from the ̽»¨Ö±²¥ of Cambridge of a new type of epigenetic modification.

Baker’s yeast cells living together in communities help feed each other, but leave incomers from the same species to die from starvation, according to new research from the ̽»¨Ö±²¥ of Cambridge.

New research dates plague back to the early Bronze Age, showing it had been endemic in humans across Eurasia for millennia prior to the first recorded global outbreak, and that ancestral plague mutated into its bubonic, flea-borne form between the 2nd and 1st millennium BC.