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 ...

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 often-mentioned fact that humans and chimpanzees are 99.9 percent identical in their DNA is hard to accept for some people, who can't comprehend how we could share so much of our basic genetic ...

URBANA, Ill. – 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 ...

In a giant feat of genetic engineering, scientists have created bacteria that make proteins in a radically different way than all natural species do. By Carl Zimmer At the heart of all life is a code.

Since the genetic code was first deciphered in the 1960s, our genes seemed like an open book. By reading and decoding our chromosomes as linear strings of letters, like sentences in a novel, we can ...

Nearly all living organisms use the same genetic code, a complicated mechanism by which genetic information is translated into proteins, the building blocks of life. A new study suggests conventional ...

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.