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Our safety and prosperity are more dependent than ever on scientific breakthroughs. Medical advances like vaccines, rapid diagnostics, and new drugs all require a robust and innovative STEM workforce, as do other endeavors that hinge on genetic research, including agriculture, biotechnology, and conservation. The contributions of immigrant and visiting scientists in the US have substantially…

The Genetics Society of America outlines its goals for anti-racism actions.

As yet another Black man suffocates under a policeman’s knee, cities burn, and the coronavirus spreads a disproportionate burden of suffering and death to communities of color, we are in a moment that calls for action. It would be heartfelt and true for White scientists like me to say to our colleagues and fellow citizens…

The GSA Journals, GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, are proud to present our annual Spotlight booklets for research published in 2019. Each Spotlight is a showcase of the excellent research and scholarship published over the course of the year, along with a selection of striking images submitted by our authors. Browse the 2019 GENETICS Spotlight. Browse the 2019 G3 Spotlight.

Congratulations to the winners of the Editors’ Choice Awards for outstanding articles published in GENETICS in 2019! The journal’s Editorial Board considered a diverse range of articles, finding many papers worthy of recognition. After much deliberation, they settled on one exceptional article for each of the three award categories: molecular genetics, population and evolutionary genetics, and quantitative genetics.…

Today it’s easy to take for granted that geneticists can identify a mutation, find its gene, and map it to the expressed protein. But just a few decades ago, this problem remained a thorny one. Welcome Bender of Harvard Medical School—with his work teasing out the function of the bithorax complex in Drosophila—made key advances…

Julie Ahringer has focused her career on understanding development and transcriptional regulation in Caenorhabditis elegans. Along the way her lab has built invaluable tools, including a genome-wide RNAi library, that have supported a huge range of discoveries across biology. In recognition of this work, Ahringer has been awarded the 2020 George W. Beadle Award from…

Fifteen years ago, Seth Bordenstein and a small group of colleagues started planning a series of lab experiences that would bring cutting edge genetics methods into biology classrooms. Because they worked on Wolbachia microbes that live in half of the world’s arthropod species, they centered the work on these bacterial parasites and started locally with…

GSA’s Executive Director explains why and how we’re taking TAGC 2020 virtual.   For several years, we at GSA have been planning The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), originally set for DC in late April 2020. After a successful inaugural meeting in 2016, organizers and GSA staff sought to bring communities together by focusing on scientific…

The Victoria Finnerty Travel Award supports travel costs for undergraduate GSA members who are engaged in research to attend the Annual Drosophila Research Conference, which was to be part of TAGC in 2020. Due to TAGC moving to an online format, 2020 awardees will instead present their work virtually at TAGC Online. Victoria Finnerty, who…

When Bonnie Bassler was wrapping up her biochemistry PhD at Johns Hopkins University, she heard a research talk at a small conference in Baltimore that switched on a light and changed her career. A geneticist described how groups of bioluminescent marine Vibrio bacteria could start glowing simultaneously. “I’m sitting there thinking ‘Holy Smokes, how is…