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 ...

Called “Lamarckian Inheritance,” the theory suggests that those experiences can even be passed down to future generations.

The Finnish population has provided investigators with a rare opportunity. Most Finns descend from a small, so-called founder population of individuals, and people have primarily reproduced with ...

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 ...

Colorectal cancer is often linked to lifestyle, but inherited gene mutations can also raise risk. Hereditary conditions like Lynch syndrome and familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) can lead to ...

In most plants and animals, including humans, mitochondria are inherited exclusively, or nearly exclusively, from the mother.

Genetics can play a role in a person's odds for Alzheimer's disease, and new research suggests differences in that risk are based on which parent had the illness. In a study of 4,400 people still ...

Neurofibromatosis type 2 is caused by a change in the NF2 gene located on chromosome 22. This gene encodes a protein known as merlin. Mutations in the NF2 gene disrupt the function of merlin, which is ...

Although schwannomatosis is a genetic condition, the inheritance patterns for this disorder are complex and much less clear than for both NF1 and NF2. Some cases of schwannomatosis are familial, with ...