Proteins that were present during the origin of life may have consisted of only seven primordial amino acids, a study suggests. The 20 amino acids commonly found in proteins are encoded by a total of ...

Scientists have discovered a microbe that bends the rules of the genetic code. This organism, Methanosarcina acetivorans, uses a flexible translation process. One codon, UAG, traditionally a stop ...

Skoltech scientists and their colleagues have studied more than 30 thousand variants of genetic sequences encoding two fluorescent proteins in order to determine which characteristics of mRNA and of ...

Most organisms on Earth have the same basic genetic code, but it comes with some flaws. Scientists sought to work out those errors by creating their own artificial genome, which replaced E. coli’s ...

We've heard of GMOs, but this is ridiculous. Scientists at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they've engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than ...

The relative abundance of rare "words," or codons, in bacterial genes helps control how much of the corresponding protein the bacteria produce. The results could help scientists engineer bacteria more ...

The various identities of cells, whether they are in the brain, heart, kidney, or any other tissue, are defined by the genes they expressed. In basic terms, the genes that are active in a cell are ...