The same amino acid can be encoded by anywhere from one to six different strings of letters in the genetic code. Andrzej Wojcicki/Science Photo Library via Getty Images Nearly all life, from bacteria ...

All living things on Earth use a version of the same genetic code. Every cell makes proteins using the same 20 amino acids. Ribosomes, the protein-making machinery within cells, read the genetic code ...

Evolution settled on a genetic code that uses four letters to name 20 amino acids. Synthetic biologists adding new bases to DNA will be free to improve on nature — if they can. With recent innovations ...

The genetic code is a set of rules defining how the four-letter code of DNA is translated into the 20-letter code of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. The genetic code is a set ...

This circular diagram represents the genetic code, showing how the four nucleotide bases of RNA (adenine [A], cytosine [C], guanine [G], and uracil [U]) form codons that specify amino acids. Each ...

Millions of years of evolution gave life on earth a genetic dictionary with 64 words. Harvard University scientists thought they could do better. In an intriguing step toward lab-made organisms, they ...

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 ...

The Least Likely Man: Marshall Nirenberg and the Discovery of the Genetic Code by A/Professor Franklin H Portugal of the Catholic University of America and published by MIT Press is primarily a tale ...

Researchers discover a unique genetic code in Antarctic archaea that encodes a rare amino acid, potentially advancing protein ...

For more than 50 years, the RNA remained hidden in a lymph node that had been snipped out of a 38-year-old man in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That nub of tissue, the size of a ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Recent breakthroughs in genetics research may have uncovered new genes underlying common psychiatric disorders. Schizophrenia and ...

Researchers have revealed that so-called “junk DNA” contains powerful switches that help control brain cells linked to Alzheimer’s disease. By experimentally testing nearly 1,000 DNA switches in human ...