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 ...

The same amino acid can be encoded by anywhere from one to six different strings of letters in the genetic code. Andrzej Wojcicki/Science Photo Library via Getty Images Nearly all life, from bacteria ...

Pyrrolysine is an important component of methyltransferase enzymes, which the archaea use to metabolize methylamine in the environment. “The need for that metabolism and availability of the machinery ...

Whole-genome sequencing reads every DNA base. This shifts medicine from diagnosing disease based on symptoms to molecular ...

In the largest screen to date for alternative genetic codes, a computer program named Codetta scanned more than 250,000 genome sequences from bacteria and archaea to identify five never-before-seen ...

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 ...

In this AI-generated illustration of Earth at the dawn of life, a distant volcano towers over shallow pools of water. It is possible the earliest life forms evolved in such environments. Credit: ...

All living things on Earth use a version of the same genetic code. Every cell makes proteins using the same 20 amino acids. Ribosomes, the protein-making machinery within cells, read the genetic code ...

As wildly diverse as life on Earth is—whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in the Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot springs in ...

A surprising number of microbes use alternate genetic codes, different from the standard genetic code that governs the large majority of life. A census of these "recoded" genomes was recently reported ...