On May 27, 1961, Heinrich Matthaei, a postdoc working with NIH scientist Marshal Nirenberg, placed synthetic polyuracil RNA into 20 test tubes to see what it would produce. Each tube contained ...

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 ...

A traditional cassette tape holds roughly 10 to 12 songs on each side, but 328 feet of this DNA cassette tape could hold the ...

The genetics of a marine protozoan may overturn one of the long-held tenets of protein synthesis. According to conventional wisdom, the genetic code is unambiguous: each DNA triplet, or codon, ...

"First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Profile Books Ltd"--Title-page verso. The story of the discovery and cracking of the genetic code, the thing that ultimately enables a spiraling molecule ...

What scientists once dismissed as junk DNA may actually be some of the most powerful code in our genome. A new international study reveals that ancient viral DNA buried in our genes plays an active ...