There are few hard and fast rules in the study of life, but perhaps the closest we get is the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA is transcribed to RNA, which gets translated into proteins. The ...

In Sarah Yuska’s sixth-grade science class at Monocacy Middle School in Frederick, Maryland, students are just finishing up learning about body systems—respiratory, circulatory, skeletal, and so on.

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 ...

Scientists in the UK have rewritten one of life’s oldest operating systems. They have built a bacterium that functions with a stripped-down genetic code, eliminating seven of the 64 instructions used ...

The code of life is simple. Four genetic letters arranged in triplets—called codons—encode amino acids. These are the building blocks of proteins, the machinery that powers life. But the genetic code ...

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 ...

An illustration of E. coli. Scientists have been racing to shrink the genetic code of this bacterium. Kateryna Kon / Science Photo Library via Getty Images The DNA of nearly all life on Earth is made ...

The Reverse Translate tool is a professional bioinformatics application designed to back-translate protein sequences into optimized nucleotide sequences. While the natural biological flow (Central ...

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 ...

In a giant feat of genetic engineering, scientists have created bacteria that make proteins in a radically different way than all natural species do. By Carl Zimmer At the heart of all life is a code.

Liquid culture flasks of bacteria grown in yellow broth covered with tinfoil on a shaker. Bacterial strains needed to be tested every step of the way to create the highly compressed genome. Credit: ...

We have gone further than ever before in creating life that is unlike anything that has evolved naturally. The genome of an Escherichia coli bacterium has been redesigned on a computer to use just 57 ...