More than four billion years ago, Earth was a very different place. Pools of water froze and thawed in cycles, minerals shaped reactions, and molecules bumped into each other by chance. Out of this ...

New research shows how RNA, a key molecule for life, may have formed on early Earth using simple chemistry and materials delivered by asteroid impacts, linking space science with the origins of life ...

Ask a friend what DNA is and, chances are, they have a general idea. Seventy years after scientists discovered the two-stranded helix, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is widely understood as the keeper of ...

RNA Polymerase (shown in blue) moves across a template strand of DNA (shown in purple) and transcribes it into RNA (shown in red). But DNA damage blocks the RNA polymerase, causing it to stall and ...

Comparison of a single-stranded RNA and a double-stranded DNA with their corresponding nucleobases. (Image: Wikimedia Commons, CC SA 3.0) The most common type of base pairing is the Watson-Crick base ...

Using a novel method, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers map 16 types of simultaneous changes in dozens of samples; ...

Chemist Anne Lüscher showed at 39C3 how synthetic DNA can be used for data storage and tamper-proof authentication.

It has been claimed that because most of our DNA is active, it must be important, but now human-plant hybrid cells have been ...