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Hear about the DNA organisation that accompanies cancer, how synaesthetes' pupil size changes just by thinking of a colour, the origins of our individuality and more.

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Latest articles

    1. Genetics and Genomics
    2. Developmental Biology
    grid of multicoloured bar graphs with vertical shaded areas in red and green highlighting specific columns

    Lifestyle, Environment and Epigenetic Inheritance: A Collection of Articles

    Edited by Wei Yan
    eLife publishes research on the mechanisms and biological significance of environmentally driven epigenetic inheritance.
  1. Research Culture: From East to West – an early-career researcher’s voyage across continents

    Samuel C Eziuzor
    International early-career researchers navigating doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowships face compounding structural precarity at every stage but also accumulate a distinctive professional toolkit that institutions on both sides are poorly equipped to recognise or support.
  2. Close-up of an iris

    Episode 105: September 2026

    In this episode, we hear about the origins of our individuality, how synaesthetes' pupil size changes just by thinking of a colour, female chickadees expanding the spectrum of cognitive abilities through non-monogamy, urban wildlife, and the switch to DNA organisation that accompanies cancer.
    1. Cell Biology
    2. Computational and Systems Biology

    Philosophy of Biology: The power of theory in the life sciences

    Jacob L Fine, Finn Creeggan ... Adam MR Groh
    Theory can help address cell and molecular biology’s major challenges, particularly those arising from large omics datasets.
    1. Genetics and Genomics

    Environmental Learning: How experience shapes individuality

    Bassem A Hassan
    Behavioural diversity across fruit flies changes with individual learning, even when genetic, past and momentary environmental factors are held constant.
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    Insight
  3. Point of View: Scientific writing is not a murder mystery

    Charlotte A Dodson
    What murder mysteries can tell us about how not to write a scientific article.
    1. Neuroscience

    Visual Categorization: How monkeys carve up the visual world

    Binxu Wang
    Monkeys generalize many visual categorization rules, such as animate versus inanimate, but fail on culturally defined ones, placing their behavior closer to networks trained on images alone than to humans.
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    Insight
    1. Cell Biology

    Stress: How to give cells an identity crisis

    Paige Dillon, Julie Hollien
    The transcription factor CHOP helps cells switch from an emergency stress response to a chronic one, where cells survive but lose some of the functions that define their identity.
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    Insight
    1. Epidemiology and Global Health

    Malaria Prevention: Using mathematical models to optimise mosquito net distribution

    Carlos A Prete Jr
    Tailoring malaria control interventions to regional transmission dynamics and behavioural characteristics can optimise them in resource-limited settings.
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    Insight
    1. Plant Biology

    Mixotrophy: An updated view of glucose pathways in cyanobacteria

    José Manuel García-Fernández
    Contrary to previous belief, the cyanobacterium Synechocystis lacks the Entner-Doudoroff pathway for glucose metabolism.
    Version of Record
    Insight