Scientists have long believed that a universal genetic code serves as a blueprint for all life on Earth, dictating the structure and function of organisms from the simplest bacteria to complex humans.

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 ...

From CRISPR to gene banking, synthetic biology has big implications for wildlife evolution and conservation, but ethical ...

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 ...

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function. But how and why did it come to be the way it is? A recent ...

Liquid culture flasks of bacteria grown in yellow broth covered with tinfoil on a shaker. Bacterial strains needed to be tested every step of the way to create the highly compressed genome. Credit: ...

LA JOLLA, CA—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 ...

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — A group of scientists at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center has uncovered a new genetic code that deploys a cluster of cells that attack healthy organs and overpowers the ...

DNA is admired for its perfection as a programmable information molecule: it uses repeating polymerization chemistry to link four nucleotide building blocks (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) ...

Synthetic biologists from Yale were able to re-write the genetic code of an organism - a novel genomically recoded organism (GRO) with one stop codon - using a cellular platform that they developed ...