News

The Amalienborg Prize was established by Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik shortly after the change of throne in 1972. This year, the prize is awarded in honour of Queen Margrethe’s 85th birthday earlier in the year, and the recipient of this special award is researcher and professor Eske Willerslev.The prize is awarded in recognition of Eske Wille…

Dr Charlotte Houldcroft joined Dr Adam Rutherford on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week on Monday 24th November 2025. She discussed her work on ancient viruses which can be found in human remains which are thousands of years old. She also studies the problems these viruses cause today for organ transplant recipients.Listen to the full episode here

Dr Alex Cagan joined Hannah Fry and Dara O' Briain on the BBC Radio 4 Podcast, Curious Cases, which looked at some remarkably long-lived species and what they can teach us about ageing. This is a key area of focus for Dr Cagan's lab. Listen to the full episode here.

We are delighted to share that Professor Richard Durbin has been announced as the winner of the 2026 Genetics Society Medal."I am greatly honoured to receive the Genetics Society Medal.  I feel incredibly fortunate to be living in the era of ever-advancing insights and opportunities coming from genome sequencing, with such great colleagues and part…

Discover how nature’s giants — whales, elephants, even naked mole-rats — may hold the secrets to resisting cancer. In “Animal instincts: Exploring nature’s oncologist”, evolutionary biologist and group leader Dr Alex Cagan explores how these unique species challenge our assumptions about cancer risk, body size and longevity. “Evolution can be incr…

We are delighted to share the fantastic success members of the Department have had in the recent round of ERC Synergy awards.Professor Richard Durbin and Dr Felipe Karam-Teixeira, along with Dr Magnus Norborg in Vienna, will work to understand how metazoan genomes co exist and evolve with transposable elements.Professor Ewa Paluch (PDN) and Profess…

The Department of Genetics is back at Big Biology Day 2025 – Saturday 11 OctoberCome and explore some of biology’s biggest mysteries with us:Why do some species live much longer than others? • Peer through a microscope at real tissue samples from animals and plants with wildly different lifespans. • Play our lifespan guessing game: can you match …

This summer, the Centre for Research Informatics Training (formerly the Bioinformatics Training Facility) hosted 19 students from Saudi Arabia for a six-week residential bioinformatics summer school. The programme covered a broad range of topics, including bulk and single-cell RNA-seq, proteomics, bacterial genomics, and epidemiological modelling.W…

Professor Richard Durbin features on the latest The Naked Scientists podcast where they look at 25 years of the Human Genome Project.  What is it? and what has it achieved?The Human Genome Project was unveiled in 2000 - a magnificent milestone that promised to transform our understanding of biology and medicine.  You can listen to the full episode …

Dr Aylwyn Scally features on the latest The Naked Scientists podcast. The interview explores the origins of genetics and its potential role in helping modern gardens adapt to climate challenges like drought and pests.You can listen to the full episode here.

A new study maps infectious diseases across millennia and offers new insight into how human-animal interactions permanently transformed our health landscape.A research team led by Eske Willerslev, professor at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, has recovered ancient DNA from 214 known human pathogens in prehistoric humans…

Researchers have found that chunks of ‘flipped’ DNA can help fish quickly adapt to new habitats and evolve into new species, acting as evolutionary ‘superchargers’. Why are there so many different kinds of animals and plants on Earth? One of biology’s big questions is how new species arise and how nature’s incredible diversity came to be.Cichlid fi…

Using tiny fragments of bones and teeth dated to between 500 and 700 years ago, along with saliva samples from living members of the Picuris Pueblo, Willerslev and his team at the University of Copenhagen have demonstrated a genetic link between the Picuris Pueblo and the Pueblo Bonito site in Chaco Canyon.Located in the southwestern United States,…

We are pleased to announce that Professor Richard Durbin and Dr Felipe Karam-Teixeira have been awarded a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award for their research on genome evolution and function: 'Genome evolution driven by transposable element across the Tree of Life'.Their work focuses on how genome sequencing across species is revolutionizing biology.…

Recently published in Nature, Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin are trying to understand how ancient human populations mixed and changed in size over time, which is key to studying human evolution. They developed a new genetic model, called COBRAA, that helps track how ancient groups split apart and later merged again.Using this mode…