Huge sections of the human genome are made up of highly repetitive sequences, areas where bases like ATATAT repeat in very long strings. For many years, scientists wrote these repetitive sequences off ...

Inactivation of mismatch repair (MMR) causes inherited and sporadic cancers 1. These tumours exhibit microsatellite instability (MSI) - length alterations within short repeats. MSI is a diagnostic and ...

Scientists have found that non-coding ‘junk’ DNA, far from being harmless and inert, could potentially contribute to the development of cancer. Their study has shown how non-coding DNA can get in the ...

One of the most detailed 3D maps of how the human chromosomes are organized and folded within a cell's nucleus is published in Nature.

Like its viral cousins, a somewhat parasitic DNA sequence called a retrotransposon has been found borrowing the cell’s own machinery to achieve its goals. In a new work appearing online Wednesday in ...

Since the 1990s, nanopores have been used for sequencing strands of DNA. A voltage is applied across the nanopore, which is embedded in a thin lipid membrane, causing a stretch of DNA to thread ...

Zettabytes—that’s 10 21 bytes—of data are currently generated every year. All of those cat videos have to be stored somewhere, and DNA is a great storage medium; it has amazing data density and is ...