For decades, scientists working with genetic material have labored with a few basic rules in mind. To start, DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA), and mRNA is translated into proteins, which ...

One of modern biologists' most ambitious goals is to learn how to expand or otherwise modify the genetic code of life on Earth, in order to make new, artificial life forms. Part of the motivation for ...

Human genes are written in long strings of three-letter units composed of four different nucleotides. These units—or codons—specify one of many amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Multiple ...

A new examination of the way different tissues read information from genes has discovered that the brain and testes appear to be extraordinarily open to the use of rare codons to produce a given ...

Somewhere in a sample of ordinary pond water, a single-celled organism has been quietly breaking one of biology’s most fundamental rules. Condylostoma magnum, a free-living ciliate barely visible to ...

We have gone further than ever before in creating life that is unlike anything that has evolved naturally. The genome of an Escherichia coli bacterium has been redesigned on a computer to use just 57 ...

Superimposed on the genetic sequences coding for amino acids is a second genetic code. This second genetic code, which makes use of dual-use codons, or duons, specifies how genes are controlled. The ...

Two proteins comprising the ZEB family of zinc finger transcription factors, ZEB1 and ZEB2, execute EMT programs in embryonic development and cancer. By studying regulation of their expression, we ...

As wildly diverse as life on Earth is—whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in the Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot springs in ...

A central tenet of biology may need updating given new measurements of start codons. For decades, scientists working with genetic material have labored with a few basic rules in mind. To start, DNA is ...