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Tracing Evolutionary Roots of the Genetic Code

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function.

17 Sep 2025

Discovery of R-Loops Reveals Key Vulnerability in HIV-1 Life Cycle

Researchers at the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) at Heidelberg University Hospital have decoded a previously unknown mechanism by which HIV-1 selects its integration targets in the human genome.

17 Sep 2025

A Molecular Magnifying Glass for Tracking Protein Misfolding in Living Cells

A novel strategy developed at Rice University allows scientists to zoom in on tiny segments of proteins inside living cells, revealing localized environmental changes that could indicate the earliest stages of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer.

15 Sep 2025

Cheesemaking Inspires New Insights into Fungal Evolution and Food Security

Many scientific discoveries are serendipitous-the result of chance. Seeing evolution in action in a cheese cave turned out to be exactly that for Benjamin Wolfe, associate professor of biology, and his colleagues.

15 Sep 2025

PhoBITs Enable Unprecedented Control of Cellular Pathways with Blue Light

Imagine being able to flip a light switch to control disease pathways inside a living cell. A team of visionary researchers at the Texas A&M University Health Science Center (Texas A&M Health) is making this dream a reality with their groundbreaking genetic tools known as photo-inducible binary interaction tools, or PhoBITs.

10 Sep 2025

Predicting Protein Metal Binding with New Artificial Intelligence Model

Biologists and computational scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory recently refined two artificial intelligence (AI) programs originally built by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, to predict protein shapes.

10 Sep 2025

Unraveling How Fly Embryos Solve the Fundamental Problem of "Tissue Tectonic Collision"

Combining classic comparative approaches, including collecting species from the wild, and cutting-edge light-induced gene manipulation technology, researchers from Japan and Germany have discovered how developing fly embryos solve the fundamental problem of "tissue tectonic collision" when the rapidly expanding head and torso tissues crash into each other.

10 Sep 2025

Scientists Engineer E. Coli To Produce Plastic-Building Chemical

This study reveals a novel pathway in E. coli for synthesizing 2,5-pyridinedicarboxylate from glucose, offering a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.

10 Sep 2025

CRISPRi Screening Reveals Genetic Insights into Cyanobacteria Acclimation

Cyanobacteria are the most abundant photosynthetic microorganisms on Earth. They live in nearly every habitat throughout the world, from permafrost to hot springs and from soils to oceans.

5 Sep 2025

Intestinal Cells Pull Rather Than Push to Remove Weaker Neighbors

Cells on the inner surface of the intestine are replaced every few days. But, how does this work? It was always assumed that cells leave the intestinal surface because excess cells are pushed out. In a recent publication in the journal Science, researchers of the Hubrecht Institute and AMOLF show that this is not correct.

4 Sep 2025

Scientists Uncover Hidden Role of Cas9 in Building Bacterial Immune Memory

When scientists discovered how bacteria protect themselves against viral invaders, called phages, in the early 2000s, little did they know they'd stumbled upon a revolutionary tool researchers could use to edit the DNA of living cells.

4 Sep 2025

Automated 3D Imaging Uncovers Genetic Markers for Sorghum Leaf Arrangement

By reconstructing 366 sorghum plants from calibrated images, the team showed that automated measurements achieved near-human repeatability and enabled genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to uncover genetic markers linked to leaf orientation.

3 Sep 2025

Genetic Discovery Reveals How Plants Respond to Blue Light and Cold

Plants may be stuck in one place, but the world around them is constantly changing. In order to grow and flower at the right time, plants must constantly collect information about their surroundings, measuring things like temperature, brightness, and length of day.

3 Sep 2025

Genetic Evidence Links Human Migration to Linguistic Exchange

Throughout human history, there have been many instances where two populations came into contact – especially in the past few thousand years because of large-scale migrations as a consequence of conquests, colonialization, and, more recently, globalization.

2 Sep 2025