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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It took 12 years and $3bn to sequence the human genome and figure out the code in our DNA. These days, people can post off a blood sample and get information on their genetic inheritance for as little ...

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 pursuit to fulfill this mandate not only brings clarity to our meaning and purpose in this world, but it also creates the ...

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 ...

Which matters more to your health — nature, or environment? A new study has started to answer that question in a comprehensive way and it shows the scale falls on the side of nurture over nature, at ...

There are 20 canonical amino acids that are encoded by the genetic code of nearly all known organisms - there are only very few exceptions. In order to add novel building blocks to this existing ...