In 1968, the American biochemist and geneticist Marshall Nirenberg and his colleagues won the Nobel Prize in physiology or ...

An international team led by Monash University researchers has uncovered the genetic code governing the way genetic mutations affect mRNA and result in disease. This breakthrough, detailed in a new ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

The first great branching of the evolutionary tree, between bacteria and archaea, may have happened before either of them ...

Nearly all living organisms use the same genetic code, a complicated mechanism by which genetic information is translated into proteins, the building blocks of life. A new study suggests conventional ...

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 team from the University of Illinois has uncovered surprising evolutionary links between the genetic code and tiny protein fragments called dipeptides. By analyzing billions of dipeptide sequences ...

For many years, scientists have known that genetic variants, or differences in DNA code across people, play some role in neurological and psychiatric disorders. But the details were murky. Now, ...

The genetic code for just about all forms of life on Earth is fairly universal. It has the same 64 codons (sequences of nucleotides), molecules that both encode the amino acids (which encode the ...

OUR scalp cells sprout hair while the cells lining our nose and lungs make mucus. Our fat cells bloat, our retinal cells turn light into electricity, and our heart cells contract to order. Yet every ...