The problem of cell type became clear to genome biologist Jason Buenrostro in 2013. He was studying a cell line derived from someone with cancer, trying to map out how the DNA was arranged in the ...

Life’s fundamental structure is the cell, and so the main things that a cell does — processing biomolecules, growing, replicating its genetic material and producing a new body — are considered ...

Understanding the human cell is vital to progress in the life sciences and to human health. Cells are the smallest, most basic unit of life responsible for all of life’s processes. A typical human ...

Few questions have captivated humankind more than the origin of life on Earth. How did the first living cells come to exist? How did these early protocells develop the structural membranes necessary ...

The cell--the irreducible unit of life on Earth--has an estimated history nigh on 3.5 billion years. Scientists since Charles Darwin have attempted to trace that history to a so-called last common ...

From the bizarre creatures in the depths of the oceans to the bacteria inside our bodies, all life on Earth consists of cells. But we have only a very rough idea of how even the simplest of those ...