Katherine Unger Baillie

Every morning this past July, Max Emanuel, a veterinary student at the University of Pennsylvania, would get up and drive to work. But Emanuel’s was no run-of-the-mill morning commute.

It’s an early lesson in genetics: we get half our DNA from Mom, half from Dad. But that straightforward explanation does not account for a process that sometimes occurs when cells divide. Called gene conversion, the copy of a gene from Mom can replace the one from Dad, or vice versa, making the two copies identical.

They live on our skin, in our guts, in our bathtubs, and in the soil. They can keep us healthy, and they can kill us. We know a lot about them, but we’ve only scratched the surface.

As long as humans have been alive, they’ve been seeking ways to extend life just a little longer. So far no one has found the fountain of youth, but researchers have begun to understand how humans age, little by little, offering hope for therapies that may blunt the effects of time on the body.

Study after study has proven it true: exercise is good for you. But new research from University of Pennsylvania scientists suggests that exercise may have an added benefit for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy, while potentially lifesaving, is notoriously draining on the human body. It can make patients feel fatigued, nauseated, and downright lousy.

The key to a successful cancer surgery is to extract every last bit of the tumor. If any cancerous cells are left behind, they could cause the disease to reappear in the same place or close by later on. Imagine how useful it would be if the malignant tissue glowed bright green, practically shouting, “Cut me out, I’m dangerous!” Turns out, it can.

One of the goals of genome sequencing is to identify genetic mutations associated with increased susceptibility to disease. Yet by and large these discoveries have been made in people of European or Asian ancestry, resulting in an incomplete picture of global genetic variation in disease vulnerability.

For decades, researchers have used petri dishes to study cell movement. These classic tissue culture tools, however, only permit two-dimensional movement, very different from the three-dimensional movements that cells make in a human body.