In Mendelian inheritance patterns, you receive one version of a gene, called an allele, from each parent. These alleles can be dominant or recessive. Non-Mendelian genetics don’t completely follow ...

Smile dimples aren't caused by a dominant gene — a biologist explains the muscle quirk behind them, and two surprising body ...

Forty years ago, a postdoctoral researcher named James McGrath who would go on to spend more than three decades as a clinical geneticist and research scientist at Yale, made a discovery that advanced ...

Scientists have long known that the DNA code in genes is not the only way to pass genetic traits from parents to offspring. "Epigenetic" marks—chemical modifications to DNA that don't change the DNA ...

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen ...

Most people with ALS don’t have a family history of it. Still, some cases of ALS are linked to inheriting specific gene mutations. Even nonfamilial cases can be linked to sporadic gene mutations that ...

In biology classrooms across the world, students learn to roll their tongues. It’s almost a rite of passage, often folded into a lesson about Mendelian genetics. It’s supposed to be a simple ...