The same amino acid can be encoded by anywhere from one to six different strings of letters in the genetic code. Andrzej Wojcicki/Science Photo Library via Getty Images Nearly all life, from bacteria ...

The genetic code is a set of rules defining how the four-letter code of DNA is translated into the 20-letter code of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. The genetic code is a set ...

Millions of years of evolution gave life on earth a genetic dictionary with 64 words. Harvard University scientists thought they could do better. In an intriguing step toward lab-made organisms, they ...

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function. But how and why did it come to be the way it is? Subscribe ...

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 ...

For more than 50 years, the RNA remained hidden in a lymph node that had been snipped out of a 38-year-old man in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That nub of tissue, the size of a ...

New research is casting doubt on a commonly held belief about how cells use DNA to make proteins, suggesting the genetic code is more diverse than previously thought. New research is casting doubt on ...

The people who spurred private spaceflight with a $10 million prize are doing the same for personalized medicine. The X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million to the first company that can process ...

The often-mentioned fact that humans and chimpanzees are 99.9 percent identical in their DNA is hard to accept for some people, who can't comprehend how we could share so much of our basic genetic ...