ComBio begins in Canberra next week and as part of our preview we talk to plenary speaker Rob Last about the tomato trichome project.

Researchers answer brain tumour 'cell of origin' question

Viruses come alive as French scientists discover new family of viruses that infects others

Swedish researchers track down the mutation that causes horses to go grey

With the lifting of two moratoria on genetically modified crops in Australia recently, so did the inevitably polarised debate take off. Those for and against are unlikely to change their minds and, unfortunately, some scientists are now afraid to speak theirs.

Nature Genetics papers find further links between pigmentation and skin cancer.

Salvador, Warts, Hippo and Yorkie are an eclectically named group of genes that form the core components of a signalling pathway in Drosophila that regulates control of organ size and may have some important parallels with human cancer.

Who would have thought that Chinese vegies, phosphopeptides and stressed mitochondria might advance the treatment of type 2 diabetes?

Model organisms such as zebrafish are vitally important in answering basic questions of developmental cell biology and signalling, and those built for distance and not speed may just have a few more prickles.

The New Directions in Leukaemia Research Conference starts next week and will feature John Rasko and two zinc finger transcription factors called BORIS and CTCF.

Graeme O'Neill has been writing about science for almost 30 years and along the way he's developed a couple of favourite stories. One is the evolution of fruit bats, recounted in our last issue, and the other is the role of FOXP2, sometimes called the Chomsky Gene. In a sublime twist, the two stories have merged together.