Despite awe-inspiring diversity, nearly every lifeform—from bacteria to blue whales—shares the same genetic code. How and ...

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 ...

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 ...

There are few hard and fast rules in the study of life, but perhaps the closest we get is the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA is transcribed to RNA, which gets translated into proteins. The ...

The DNA of nearly all life on Earth contains many redundancies, and scientists have long wondered whether these redundancies served a purpose or if they were just leftovers from evolutionary processes ...

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 ...