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Palm oil producers thought they had licked shortages of edible oil and biofuel in the 1980s, when they learned to make genetically identical copies of high oil-yielding palms. But when the cloned palms matured, some plants made shriveled fruits with very little oil. Exactly how these dry, “mantled” fruits spawned from twins of oil-gushing palms has been a mystery ever since.

Oil-barren...

Old cells do not go gently into that good night. In people who age prematurely, changes in the way that DNA is tightly packed in cells leads to mayhem that promotes the aging process, researchers have discovered.

Werner syndrome, a genetic disorder also known as adult progeria, leads to graying hair, cataracts, osteoporosis and other signs of aging in people in their 20s. Researchers...

The developing brain undergoes rapid and tightly coordinated changes in a molecular process known to help regulate gene activity, a new study shows.

Dramatic changes in DNA methylation, a process that usually quashes activity of nearby genes, occur during the first six months of brain development, researchers report February 3 in Genome Research. Geneticist Jonathan Mill of the...

Growing up in poverty or an unstable home is associated with shortened protective caps on the ends of children’s chromosomes, researchers report April 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Shorter chromosome caps, called telomeres, have been linked to increased risk of death.

In a study of 40 nine-year-old boys, kids from underprivileged backgrounds had telomeres that...