An analysis of the genomes of nearly 6,000 Greenlandic people suggests that their Inuit ancestors rarely moved around after settling the island around 1,000 years ago. This historical isolation means that people from some parts of Greenland are more likely to develop certain genetic diseases than are people in other parts of the world. The findings, published on 12 February in Nature1, offer 'new insights' on how genetics can be used to deliver better health care to Arctic populations, says Anders Koch, a senior physician at Queen Ingrid's Hospital in Nuuk. Small, Indigenous populations ' including Greenland's ' have long been a blind spot in genetics research, because most of the DNA in genetic databases comes from people of European ancestry. What little research has been done on the island suggests that living in the Arctic has profoundly altered the genetic make-up of Greenlanders, most of whom have mixed Inuit and European ancestry. In the current study, researchers sequenced the DNA of 5,996 Greenlanders ' around 14% of the adult population. By comparing these full or partially sequenced genomes, the team was able to confirm that Greenland was originally populated by a small group of travellers, fewer than 300 people, who arrived from Siberia, via North America, in the past 1,000 years....

One of my favourite summer pastimes is enjoying a cold beer in a bar with friends after work. But not just any beer ' it has to be a lager. And I am not alone. With its crisp and refreshing profile, lager accounts for more than 90% of the global beer market. However, all lager beers taste quite similar, and the diversity of flavours and aromas is limited. This is mainly due to the small numbers of commercial yeast available for production. But what if we could break free from these constraints and create completely new and exciting flavours' Yeast are unicellular fungi that ferment sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. For centuries, humans have used yeast, consciously or unconsciously, to produce fermented foods, such as wine, beer and bread. The traditional lager yeast, Saccharomyces pastorianus, is a hybrid cross between two yeast species: S. cerevisiae (used for producing wine and ale beer) and S.eubayanus (a wild species found on trees). However, this long history of selective breeding, similar to what we see in our livestock, crops and pets has also narrowed the genetic diversity of lager yeast, resulting in a strongly limited range of available flavours and aromas ' leaving little room for innovation....

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing's Querida Anderson chats with Lawrence Ingrassia about his book A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery (Henry Holt and Co./Macmillan Publishers, May 2024). Ingrassia details his family's battle with numerous cancers, spotlights the pioneers who worked tirelessly to solve the puzzle of genetic mutations, and explores the ongoing advancement in cancer research and development. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can also watch the full video at the end of this page. A Fatal Inheritance is a memoir and medical detective story about my family and families like mine who question seemingly unrelated cancer diagnoses and about the doctors who solved the medical mystery behind those cancers. The writing process helped me expand my understanding of cancer and cancer treatment improvement. Initially, I didn't plan to write a book. I wanted to learn more about Li-Fraumeni syndrome, the cancer condition that robbed me of my family. My mother died of breast cancer at 42, and my youngest sister died of abdominal cancer at 24. Additionally, my other sister died of lung cancer at 32, my brother died of cancer at 69, and his son was diagnosed with his first cancer when he was only two years old....

For years, scientists ' and the public ' in China have been fascinated by Qizai, the only brown-and-white panda in captivity. Found abandoned in the wild, he lives at Louguantai Wild Animal Breeding and Protection Center in Xi'An. Only seven brown-and-white pandas have ever been documented ' all from Qinling, a mountain range in the Chinese province of Shaanxi. 'Previous studies2 suggested that Qinling pandas may have been separated from Sichuan pandas around 300,000 years ago,' says Hu, a conservation geneticist at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. Hu and his colleagues studied the genomic information of three 'family trios' ' a pair of panda parents and their cub ' associated with two brown pandas, along with the genomes of 29 other black-and-white pandas. The trios were Qizai and his parents; Qizai, his mate and their cub; and Dandan ' the first brown panda to be documented in China, nearly four decades ago ' her mate and their cub. Among them, only Qizai and the now-deceased Dandan are brown and white....