This is a summary of: Liu. H. et al. Viral RNA blocks circularization to evade host codon usage control. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09809-y (2025).

A virus relies on the host's translation machinery to replicate itself and become infectious. Translation efficiency ...

While codons (combinations of three nucleotides) may vary in which do what functions, a long-standing rule was that each codon serves one specific purpose. New evidence, however suggests that ...

Most organisms on Earth have the same basic genetic code, but it comes with some flaws. Scientists sought to work out those errors by creating their own artificial genome, which replaced E. coli’s ...

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 ...

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

61 codons specify one of the 20 amino acids that make up proteins 3 codons are stop codons, which signal the termination of protein synthesis Importantly, the genetic code is nearly universal, shared ...

It's a dogma taught in every introductory biology class: Proteins are composed of combinations of 20 different amino acids, arranged into diverse sequences like words. But researchers trying to ...

Scientists trying to engineer biologic molecules with new functions have long felt limited by the 20 amino-acid building blocks. Researchers are working to develop ways of putting new building ...