Researchers have reconstructed ancient herpesvirus genomes from Iron Age and medieval Europeans, revealing that HHV-6 has been infecting humans for at least 2,500 years. Some people inherited the ...

How much of our genome really matters? Some argue that because most of our DNA is active, it must be doing something important. Others say even random DNA would be highly active. This has now been put ...

Scientists recover DNA from a 5,500-year-old burial in Colombia, revealing ancient syphilis-related bacteria and reshaping disease history.

An ancient DNA analysis of a 5,500-year-old human skeleton reveals that an ancestor of the bacterium that causes syphilis was ...

The discovery, led by evolutionary genomics researcher Davide Bozzi, pushes back the evidence for treponemal diseases, as ...

Ancient DNA is turning human evolution into a crime scene reconstruction, and one of the prime suspects is a herpesvirus that ...

Scientists have recovered a genome of Treponema pallidum—the bacterium whose subspecies today are responsible for four ...

Some modern humans carry Neanderthal gene variants that affect how their bodies metabolize common medications. This explains recent genetic research linking ancient interbreeding to slower drug ...

Neanderthals and humans mated millennia ago, and their legacy lives on in us today. Here's how. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Researchers have discovered how cells activate a last-resort DNA repair system when severe damage strikes. When genetic tangles overwhelm normal repair pathways, cells flip on a fast but error-prone ...