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 ...

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make ...

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, ...

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 ...