A vast search of natural diversity has led scientists at MIT's McGovern Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to uncover ancient systems with the potential to expand the genome-editing toolbox. These systems, ...
The first life on Earth formed four billion years ago, as microbes living in pools and seas: what if the same thing happened on Mars? If it did, how would we prove it? Scientists hoping to identify fossil evidence of ancient ...
Cells are constantly on the move, whether in a developing embryo or metastatic cancer. But how do cells adapt to the new environments they encounter? Traditionally, scientists have believed that cells adapt to changes and ...
We often forget how wonderful it is that life exists, and what a special and unique phenomenon it is. As far as we know, ours is the only planet capable of supporting life, and it seems to have arisen in the form of something ...
Researchers have revealed new details about the CRISPR-Cas5-HNH/Cascade complex, a variant of the type I-E CRISPR-Cas system, providing insights into its DNA recognition and cleavage mechanisms.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Berkeley Laboratory, have published a study in Science Advances that evaluates the current ...
Viral reverse transcriptase (RT) plays a critical role in replication (e.g., retroviruses, that reverse transcribe RNA templates into complementary DNA) and genome mutations (e.g., diversity-generating retroelements in bacteriophages). ...
In the midst of the ongoing global biodiversity crisis, even the smallest habitats like ponds demand our attention. Fragmentation of these habitats—driven by human activities like urbanization, agriculture, and land-use changes—poses ...
In 2021, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, reported an astonishing new form of symbiosis: They found a unique bacterium that lives inside a ciliate—a unicellular eukaryote—and ...
Within a cell, DNA carries the genetic code for building proteins. To build proteins, the cell makes a copy of DNA, called mRNA. Then, another molecule called a ribosome reads the mRNA, translating it into protein. But this ...
