The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of ...

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

By simulating the life cycle of a minimal bacterial cell—from DNA replication to protein translation to metabolism and cell ...

The DNA packed inside every human cell contains instructions for life, written in billions of letters of genetic code. Every time a cell divides, the complete code, divided among 46 chromosomes, must ...

Embryonic stem (ES) cells are pluripotent stem cells that can produce all cell types of an organism. ES cells proliferate rapidly and have been thought to experience high levels of intrinsic ...

A team of researchers at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center has identified a new pathway through which mutations in the tumor suppressor p53 gene—found very frequently in human tumors—hijack DNA ...

Genetics tools have advanced significantly in recent decades, and have allowed scientist to sequence all of the genetic ...

A fleeting DNA fold called i‑DNA can switch cancer‑related genes on and off, revealing a hidden structural weak point that ...

For many years, researchers believed that the DNA inside a newly fertilized egg began as a structural ‘blank slate’ – a loose, unorganized mass that would only take shape once the embryo started using ...