The DNA inside of living organisms is packed with information, so much so that it's hard to search genetic databases, but ...

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 ...

Pyrrolysine is an important component of methyltransferase enzymes, which the archaea use to metabolize methylamine in the environment. “The need for that metabolism and availability of the machinery ...

In the largest screen to date for alternative genetic codes, a computer program named Codetta scanned more than 250,000 genome sequences from bacteria and archaea to identify five never-before-seen ...

Whole-genome sequencing reads every DNA base. This shifts medicine from diagnosing disease based on symptoms to molecular ...

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 ...

As wildly diverse as life on Earth is—whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in the Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot springs in ...

All living things on Earth use a version of the same genetic code. Every cell makes proteins using the same 20 amino acids. Ribosomes, the protein-making machinery within cells, read the genetic code ...

DNA sequencing is one of today's most critical scientific fields, powering leaps in humanity's understanding of genetic causes of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and diabetes. One issue facing the ...