On May 27, 1961, Heinrich Matthaei, a postdoc working with NIH scientist Marshal Nirenberg, placed synthetic polyuracil RNA into 20 test tubes to see what it would produce. Each tube contained ...

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 ...

It’s been 80 million years since our our evolutionary branch diverged from mice — so why do we share some fragments of DNA that are essentially unchanged? (Fred Hutch News Service Illustration / Kim ...

Scientists have marveled at the ingenuity of the DNA code since it was first deciphered in the early sixties, but now it appears that there is much more to it than previously known. A research team at ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 ...

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

The genetics of a marine protozoan may overturn one of the long-held tenets of protein synthesis. According to conventional wisdom, the genetic code is unambiguous: each DNA triplet, or codon, ...

James Watson, the scientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA, died on Nov. 6, 2025, at the age of 97 On a foggy Saturday morning in 1953, a tall, skinny 24-year-old man fiddled with shapes he ...