Nature is wonderfully abundant, diverse and mysterious -- but biological research today tends to focus on only seven species, including rats, chickens, fruit flies and us. We're studying an astonishingly narrow sliver of life, says biologist Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, and hoping it'll be enough to solve the oldest, most challenging problems in ...

Whether it is from a single flatworm from Barcelona or a snail from the jungles of Brazil, biology has tried to fully unveil how life in this world works and how it has evolved. It is without a doubt that in the last couple hundred years, thanks to new technology, data acquisition in genetics has exponentially grown and will continue to do so, p...