Springer Nature

In episode two of our editorial series, we meet Dr Marc Stift (University of Konstanz). A plant evolutionary geneticist with three years under his belt at Heredity, Marc has also authored five papers in the journal (so far). This gives him valuable perspectives from both sides of the process. What has he learnt? What tips can he give for writing a successful manuscript? And what makes him scientif...

Charles Darwin described it as the most complex mating system in the natural world. Famed statistician Ronald Fisher was fascinated by it. And this episode’s interviewees braved 40 °C heat and caimans to unravel some of its mysteries. What is it? Tristyly — a rare and mysterious plant mating system. Tune in to hear what Dr Nicolay Cunha and Prof. Spencer Barrett learnt about this system from the p...

Behind the pages of Heredity there lies a group of incredibly dedicated, brilliant scientists—our editors! Who are they? What do they actually do? What kinds of research are they passionate about? What are they looking for in a good manuscript? These are the kinds of questions we are going to explore in a new series of episodes dedicated to these unsung heroes of scientific publishing. First up, w...

Medical Simulation is a powerful model for pediatric education. This type of experiential training is used to teach various skills including stressful medical tasks like resuscitation, without putting patients at risk. In order to better understand the behaviour of healthcare providers during these situations, researchers have started to use eye-tracking technology. In this episode, we meet Early...

The sound produced by the vocal tract of a 3,000 year-old Egyptian mummy has been synthesized using CT scans, 3D printing and an electronic larynx. The findings are presented in a study published in Scientific Reports. Read the paper here: https://go.nature.com/2TUueZ4

Clinical studies have shown that newborns can experience up to 14 painful procedures each day of admission at the neonatal intensive care unit. There is evidence that these early experiences can cause changes to the developing nervous system affecting, amongst other things, nociception in adulthood. Preterm infants are at particular risk from repeated noxious procedures owing to the extensive deve...

In this episode we explore the nature vs. nurture debate in one of humanities closest companions – Dogs! Why do they do the things they do? Are their behaviours hardwired into their DNA? Tune in and listen to Dr Juliane Friedrich, Dr Pamela Wiener and Dr Marie Haskell as they discuss complex genetic behaviour traits in German shepherd dogs, collaborating with the Swedish Armed Forces, and how thei...

The annual Population Genetics Group Forum is an important, and much beloved, conference in the fields of genetics and evolution. As registration opens for the 53 meeting of PopGroup (to be held at the University of Leicester, 5th – 8th January 2020), we hear what’s in-store from three of the people organising it: Dr Rob Hammond, Dr Richard Badge and PhD student Max John. We then delve into the hi...

Fish farming, or aquaculture, is an important source of animal protein, particularly in developing nations. Unfortunately, aquaculture is highly susceptible to outbreaks of infections disease. In this episode, Lior David and Roni Tadmor-Levi (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) discuss their work trying to identify the genetic basis of disease survival in the common carp (Cyprinus carpio) when cha...

An essential aspect of life is reproduction, and an essential aspect of reproduction is sex… except when it isn’t. While common in invertebrates, asexual reproduction is only seen in around 90 vertebrate species. And in this episode, Dr Susana Freitas (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) explains her work looking at the hybrid origin of parthenogenesis in what may be the best-studied asexual vert...

Species are often thought of as discreet and separate from one another. However, hybrid zones often form between closely related species, providing the opportunity to test many evolutionary hypotheses. In this episode, we talk to Dr Henrique Batalha-Filho (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil) and Dr Marcos Maldonado-Coelho (Lund University, Sweden) about their work characterising a hybrid zone b...

The Faroe Islands are a North Atlantic archipelago, famed for being a Viking stronghold. However, for the past few centuries the islands have themselves been besieged by one of the world’s greatest invaders: the brown rat. In this episode, Dr Emily Puckett (University of Memphis) and Dr Eyðfinn Magnussen (University of the Faroe Islands) discuss their recent paper looking at the current and histor...

How do you breed a high-production cow fit for a changing world? It’s rare that we discuss the impact of climate change on cattle agriculture, yet it’s important to consider how rising temperatures will impact this important part of the global food chain. In today’s episode, Prof. Ismo Strandén, Prof. Juha Kantanen and Prof. Michael Bruford discuss a simulation-based approach for identifying optim...

Collaboration is an essential aspect of modern science, and the authors featured in today’s episode epitomise this relationship. In our most ambitions interview to date, all four first authors of a recent Heredity paper come together to discuss their work looking at range expansions in the blacktip reef shark (Carcharhinus melanopterus). Their results provide a cautionary tale for researchers inte...

Some like it hot. Some like it cold. But whatever an organism’s preference, our changing climate is likely going to force them to adapt to new temperature regimes. This raises a particularly interesting question for those species with complex life-cycles: do different life stages respond to thermal pressures in a similar way? Or do they display distinct evolutionary trends? In this episode we spea...

Storytelling facilitated both the emergence of the scientific discipline and the evolution of human intelligence. At least, that’s what Prof. Enrico Coen argues. A former President of the genetics society, Prof. Coen, from the John Innes Centre, has two articles in the recent Heredity Special issue commemorating 100 years of The Genetics Society. In the first, he creatively recounts the rise of Ho...

We tend to think of science as objective, but as with any human endeavour it is fraught with biases: cognitive, technical, personal and cultural. Interestingly, it turns out that inheritance can also be biased, with the transmission of genes often displaying anything but ‘fair’ segregation. As the Genetics Society celebrates its centenary, join president Prof. Laurence Hurst as he discusses 100 ye...

A precision medicine approach has advanced the development of new cancer therapies and researchers who study neurodegenerative diseases would like to replicate that model. Yet, few neurologists recommend genetic testing to patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Roy Alcalay, a neurologist and associate professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and c...

It’s widely understood that early life adversity has an impact on mental illness and cognitive problems later in life. There are theories as to the mechanisms of how this works, but it’s difficult to test in humans. Tallie Baram is a professor of neurophysiology and biophysics at the UC Irvine department of pediatrics. And she co-authored a recent study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology with...

Although genetic sequencing has aided the diagnosis of many genetic diseases, only about one third of children with unknown or rare genetic diseases end up with a diagnosis after exome sequencing. To help these patients, Stanley Nelson, professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, wanted to explore the genome more effectively. In a recent publication in GIM, Dr. Nels...

One of the most common chromosomal deletions in humans happens on chromosome 22. It’s known as 22q and affects as many as one in 2,000 live births. People with the deletion can present with a wide variety of traits. Some have heart defects. Others have defects in the palate, while still others have developmental delays. But in 2005, Donna McDonald-McGinn, director of the 22Q and You Center at the...

Neonatal encephalopathy (NE) is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality and affects around 1.5/1000 live term births. Predicting the severity and outcome of neonates with NE is therefore vital in order to provide the best care for neonates with NE, and a biochemical marker obtained at birth would therefore be useful to bolster the current scoring system. In this episode, Geoff Marsh sp...

The recreational drug MDMA, also known as Ecstasy or Molly, is particularly popular in social settings and raves, in large part because of how socially connected it makes the users feel. It’s being studied for use in psychotherapy —there’s a phase III clinical trial for the use of MDMA to treat PTSD. What’s clear is that the drug affects how users experience social interactions. But there are ques...

Every year more than half a million people in the US have stents placed in narrow blood vessels to improve blood flow to the heart. Following the procedure, patients typically need treatment with anti-clotting drugs. The go-to medication is clopidogrel, a prodrug that requires activation by an enzyme called CYP2C19. However, about a third of patients carry variants that render CYP2C19 ineffective....

For term-born infants, low birth weight has been shown to correlate with a broad array of adverse cardiometabolic outcomes, and excess glucocorticoid exposure has been linked to these relationships. Also, intra-uterine growth restriction (IUGR) in term-born infants has been linked to subsequent increases in adrenal androgen activity. In this episode, we meet Kristi Watterberg, a professor of Pedia...