On May 27, 1961, Heinrich Matthaei, a postdoc working with NIH scientist Marshal Nirenberg, placed synthetic polyuracil RNA into 20 test tubes to see what it would produce. Each tube contained ...
Orangutans, mice, and horses are covered with it, but humans aren't. Why we have significantly less body hair than most other mammals has long remained a mystery. But a first-of-its-kind comparison of ...
It’s been 80 million years since our our evolutionary branch diverged from mice — so why do we share some fragments of DNA that are essentially unchanged? (Fred Hutch News Service Illustration / Kim ...
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 DNA of nearly all life on Earth is made up of 64 codons, each one a sequence of three nucleotide bases, the building blocks of DNA. These codons contain instructions for building amino acids, ...
The genetics of a marine protozoan may overturn one of the long-held tenets of protein synthesis. According to conventional wisdom, the genetic code is unambiguous: each DNA triplet, or codon, ...
Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make ...
Darwin's theory of evolution should be expanded to include consideration of a DNA stability 'energy code' -- so-called 'molecular Darwinism' -- to further account for the long-term survival of species ...