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 ...

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 is this amazing thing in which a string of DNA or RNA containing sequences of four nucleotides is translated into protein sequences using 20 different amino acids," said Joanna Masel ...

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 ...

A team from the University of Illinois has uncovered surprising evolutionary links between the genetic code and tiny protein fragments called dipeptides. By analyzing billions of dipeptide sequences ...

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.

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 ...