Just like the mythical creation stories that depict the formation of the world as the story of order from chaos, the early Earth was home to a chaotic clutter of organic molecules from which, somehow, more complex biological ...
Astrobiology
Feb 6, 2019
2
299
A group of researchers from the Andalusian Centre for Molecular Biology and Regenerative Medicine (CABIMER) has revealed the importance of eliminating any excess of defective products that might have accumulated in the mitochondria, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jan 3, 2019
0
272
In cell biology, men and women are unequal: men have an X chromosome, while women have two. How can we get around this difference? Geneticists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, turned to some historic research ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 19, 2018
0
4
Babies born with pontocerebellar hypoplasia type Ib often do not survive past one year. Born with an underdeveloped brain, infants struggle to move, feed and even breathe.
Biochemistry
Dec 13, 2018
0
19
Our prehistoric Earth, bombarded with asteroids and lightning, rife with bubbling geothermal pools, may not seem hospitable today. But somewhere in the chemical chaos of our early planet, life did form. How? For decades, ...
Biochemistry
Dec 3, 2018
7
495
RNA carries pieces of instructions encoded in DNA to coordinate the production of proteins that will carry out the work to be done in a cell. But the process isn't always straightforward. Chemical modifications to DNA or ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 31, 2018
0
18
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology may have made headway in helping determine the origin of life by identifying three different molecules that self-assemble to form a molecular structure with features characteristic ...
Biochemistry
Sep 17, 2018
9
768
Virtually all functions in our bodies require precise interactions between radically different types of molecules. The vast majority of the time, these encounters yield nothing, but a special few sustain life as we know it.
Biochemistry
Aug 7, 2018
0
55
Thumb through any old science textbook, and you'll likely find RNA described as little more than a means to an end, a kind of molecular scratch paper used to construct the proteins encoded in DNA.
Biotechnology
May 4, 2018
0
210
A longstanding mystery in biology is how the millions of molecules bumping around in a cell "find" one another and organize into functional structures. So it was a big surprise in 2008 when participants in the Marine Biological ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 12, 2018
0
53
