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: ...

A team from the University of Illinois has uncovered surprising evolutionary links between the genetic code and tiny protein fragments called dipeptides. By analyzing billions of dipeptide sequences ...

Life runs on instructions you never see. Every cell reads DNA, turns that message into RNA, and then builds proteins that keep you alive. That translation system feels so basic that it is easy to ...

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.

URBANA, Ill. – Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function. But how and why did it come to be the way ...

Scientists at UC Berkeley have discovered a microbe that bends one of biology’s most sacred rules. Instead of treating a specific three-letter DNA code as a clear “stop” signal, this methane-producing ...