Scientists say they have reached an important milestone in a quest to build a life-form from scratch. They have synthesized a bacterium's entire chromosome from its chemical building blocks. Soon, ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The same amino acid can be encoded by anywhere from one to six different strings of letters in the genetic code. Andrzej ...

Each cell has their own genetic code that helps maintain viability and directs function. This genetic code is commonly referred to as deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. DNA is the molecule that carries ...

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 ...

While testing a new way to sequence genes, researchers stumbled upon a very rare divergence in the genetic code, which translates genetic sequences into proteins. The discovery was made in an organism ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Recent breakthroughs in genetics research may have uncovered new genes underlying common psychiatric disorders. Schizophrenia and ...

When a nuclear disaster empties a landscape of people, nature doesn’t politely wait for instructions. It moves in. After the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, entire ...

Viruses are ancient. They have been infecting animals, our ancestors included, for hundreds of millions of years before the first humans ever showed up. And the legacy of those primordial infections ...

How does our DNA store the massive amount of information needed to build a human being? And what happens when it's stored ...