There are approximately 20,000 human genes that encode proteins, but despite remarkable progress since the human genome was first sequenced more than a decade ago, scientists still understand in detail how only a small fraction ...
Biotechnology
Jul 17, 2015
0
35
The remarkable ease and accuracy with which scientists can alter genomes using the CRISPR-Cas9 system has led to promising advances toward improving human health and the environment through genetic engineering. Cas9, a protein ...
Biotechnology
Jul 13, 2015
0
498
Viruses need us. In order to multiply, viruses have to invade a host cell and copy their genetic information. To do so, viruses encode their own replication machinery or components that subvert the host replication machinery ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 2, 2015
6
642
Imagine someone hands you a smoothie and asks you to identify everything that went into it.
Biotechnology
May 21, 2015
0
544
For decades scientists have been looking closely at how our cells make proteins. But the inverse is equally important: how cells kill them.
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 24, 2015
0
23
Once upon a time, scientists thought RNA polymerase—the molecule that kicks off protein synthesis by transcribing DNA into RNA—worked like a wind-up toy: Set it down at a start site in our DNA and it would whir steadily ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 24, 2015
0
32
Mommy, where do intestinal stem cells come from? All right, it's not likely a kindergartner would ask such a question. But evolutionary biologists want to know.
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 10, 2015
0
69
Harvesting sunlight is a trick plants mastered more than a billion years ago, using solar energy to feed themselves from the air and water around them in the process we know as photosynthesis.
Materials Science
Feb 9, 2015
3
1906
The creation of genetically modified and entirely synthetic organisms continues to generate excitement as well as worry.
Cell & Microbiology
Jan 21, 2015
3
759
Penicillin, the wonder drug discovered in 1928, works in ways that are still mysterious almost a century later. One of the oldest and most widely used antibiotics, it attacks enzymes that build the bacterial cell wall, a ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 5, 2014
0
1
