The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

The genetic code acts as life’s instruction manual, telling cells how to build proteins from DNA and RNA. Though it's a marvel of molecular precision, the path it took to evolve remains unclear. Fresh ...

A new theory that explains why the language of our genes is more complex than it needs to be also suggests that the primordial soup where life began on earth was hot and not cold, as many scientists ...

An archaeon reads the same codon in two different ways, overturning a doctrine that has stood for 60 years. Living organisms ...

On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, skinny 24-year-old man fiddled with shapes he had cut out of cardboard. They represented fragments of a DNA molecule, and young James Watson was trying to ...

For decades, biologists treated DNA as a static string of letters, a linear code that cells read like text on a page. A new wave of research is forcing a rethink, showing that the three-dimensional ...

The beauty of the DNA code is that organisms interpret it unambiguously. Each three-letter nucleotide sequence, or codon, in a gene codes for a unique ...

EVOFLUx uses DNA methylation fluctuations as molecular barcodes to trace tumor evolution, offering insights into growth, treatment resistance, and prognosis. The method requires only bulk methylation ...