For decades, biologists have known that the instructions for life are written in DNA, yet the vast majority of those letters seemed to sit in the dark, doing little that was obvious. Now a new ...

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 ...

What if biology stopped being something we study and started becoming something we design? That’s the premise of Adrian Woolfson’s new book, On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of ...

Since the genetic code was first deciphered in the 1960s, our genes have seemed like an open book. By reading and decoding our chromosomes as linear strings of letters, like sentences in a novel, we ...

Most hypotheses suggest that earlier forms of life had partial genetic codes and used fewer than 20 amino acids. To test these hypotheses, a team from Columbia and Harvard decided to see if they could ...

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

A group of scientists at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center has revealed a new genetic code that acts like a cancer ringleader, recruiting and deploying a gang of tumor cells to incite a ...

Synthetic biologists from Yale were able to re-write the genetic code of an organism — a novel genomically recoded organism (GRO) with one stop codon — using a cellular platform that they developed ...