Crack open a biology textbook and you will find a standard icon of molecular biology: the table summarizing the standard genetic code. This refers to the set of rules by which the cell "decodes" the ...

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 ...

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

While evolution involves changes in organisms that we can observe, they undergo evolution at a deeper level, too. That is, changes affect the "letters" (four different types of chemical units) in the ...