A remarkable study, published in the April edition of the American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that a gene called caspase-12 has been inactivated in the human population because the active gene can lead to poorer response to bacterial infection. When infectious diseases became more common in human populations, perhaps because population densities grew and pathogens were able to spread more rapidly, the people with the inactive gene were at an advantage and prospered.

In a study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a team led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute highlights the need for effective diagnosis of paratyphoid fever to postpone the increase in antibiotic resistance and to defend against the loss of confidence in vaccination programmes.

Sequence differences in less than 0.2 per cent of the three-billion-base human genome play a vital role in a bewildering variety of human disease. Today, researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Cambridge University's Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, together with international colleagues report in PLoS Genetics their detailed maps of differences implicated in disease as well as genes that are unchanged in recent human history.

In a report published online on Wednesday 18 January in Molecular Systems Biology, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Edinburgh show that the proteins that comprise the synapse form a complex and densely connected molecular network. This novel model of a molecular network presents a new way to understand how information is processed in the brain and how mental illnesses arise.

On Tuesday 17 January 2006 the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute's World Trace Archive database of DNA sequences hit one billion entries. The Trace Archive is a store of all the sequence data produced and published by the world scientific community, including the Sanger Institute's own prodigious output as a world-leading genomics institution.

The two-year project will lead to the development of new DNA-based tools to identify and select breeds of pig that resist infectious diseases and produce leaner cuts of meat for consumers. There is an increasing need to improve overall pig husbandry in terms of health, welfare and sustainability, as well as traceability, food quality and safety.

Evolutionary forces tend to retain important DNA sequences, whilst allowing unimportant sequences to change. Consequently, protein-coding regions - only about 1.5 per cent of the human genome - are similar in all mammalian species.

The genome sequence of the most common mould that causes disease worldwide is published in Nature on Thursday 22 December 2005. The code of Aspergillus fumigatus, an air-borne, soil-dwelling fungus, was cracked by an international team led by researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, The Institute for Genomic Research and the University of Manchester.

Major new funding for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, announced today, will help in the battle against human disease, including three of the world's biggest killers - cancer, malaria and diabetes.

Through the Human Genome Project, the HapMap Project and other efforts, we are beginning to identify genes that are modified in some diseases. What are more difficult to measure and identify are the regulatory regions in DNA - the 'managers' of genes - that control gene activity and might be important in causing disease.