DNA sequencing is one of today's most critical scientific fields, powering leaps in humanity's understanding of genetic causes of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and diabetes. One issue facing the ...

When people think of DNA, they usually think of genes, the parts that code for proteins and drive inherited traits. But there's a whole lot of DNA beyond genes that we are just starting to understand.

Decades of research has viewed DNA as a sequence-based instruction manual; yet every cell in the body shares the same genes – so where is the language that writes the memory of cell identities?

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

When a nuclear disaster empties a landscape of people, nature doesn’t politely wait for instructions. It moves in. After the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, entire ...

There are many health problems that can be traced back to errors in the genetic code. There are also many potential benefits to genetic engineering outside of healthcare. Nature has already found ways ...

Transcription and translation are processes a cell uses to make all proteins the body needs to function from information stored in the sequence of bases in DNA. The four bases (C, A, T/U, and G in the ...

“Random DNA” is naturally active in the one-celled fungi yeast, while such DNA is turned off as its natural state in mammalian cells, despite their having a common ancestor a billion years ago and the ...