Prototaxites are something of a prehistoric mystery. They were the first giant organisms on land, towering over ancient landscapes at heights of up to 8 meters. They had smooth trunk-like pillars and no branches, leaves or ...
Some time around 1683, amateur Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek scraped the plaque from between his teeth and peered at it through a home-made microscope.
Scientists can peer into cells to get a limited view of their activity using microscopes and other tools. However, cells and the molecular events within them are dynamic, and developmental processes, disease progression and ...
A virus relies on the host's translation machinery to replicate itself and become infectious. Translation efficiency partially depends on the usage of a codon, or sequence of three nucleotides, that matches the cellular pool ...
The origin of life on Earth becomes even more fascinating and complex as we peer into the mysterious world of viruses. Said to have existed since living cells first appeared, these microscopic entities differ greatly from ...
Humans have it. So does Drosophila. But not yeast. That "it" is a small pause at the start of gene activity—a brief molecular halt that may have helped life evolve from simple cells to complex animals.
Researchers at University of Tsukuba have decoded the nuclear genome of Amorphochlora amoebiformis, a unicellular marine alga belonging to the chlorarachniophyte group.
As tough as medieval chainmail armor and as soft as a contact lens. This material is not taken from science fiction, it is a natural structure made of thousands of DNA circles interlinked with each other. Studying it can ...
A newly revealed molecular tug-of-war may have implications for better understanding how a multitude of diseases and disorders—including cancers, neurodegenerative diseases and immune disorders—originate, as well as how to ...
A newly discovered promoter element "start" points to a shared regulatory syntax for controlling transcription initiation in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes.
