The traditional explanation of the initial genetic code in life seems less established when ancient proteins seem to be recalling some other arrangement of amino-acids. A recent examination of protein ...

Life runs on instructions you never see. Every cell reads DNA, turns that message into RNA, and then builds proteins that ...

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 ...

For decades, biologists have known that the instructions for life are written in DNA, yet the vast majority of those letters seemed to sit in the dark, doing little that was obvious. Now a new ...

In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick published the molecular structure of the biological hereditary material deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) whose famous double-helical structure is now imprinted in the ...

DNA contains foundational information needed to sustain life. Understanding how this information is stored and organized has been one of the greatest scientific challenges of the last century. With ...

In this AI-generated illustration of Earth at the dawn of life, a distant volcano towers over shallow pools of water. It is possible the earliest life forms evolved in such environments. Credit: ...

DNA provides the foundational library of possibilities, but the environment serves as the librarian, choosing which books are ...

WTOP’s Matt Kaufax takes an even deeper dive into the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s “Ocean Library” through DNA collection.

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 ...