For decades, biologists have known that the instructions for life are written in DNA, yet the vast majority of those letters seemed to sit in the dark, doing little that was obvious. Now a new ...

Almost 1,500 genes have been implicated in intellectual disabilities; yet for most people with such disabilities, genetic causes remain unknown. Perhaps this is in part because geneticists have been ...

Synthetic biology aims to modify cellular behaviors by implementing genetic circuits that respond to changes in cell state. Integrating genetic biosensors into endogenous gene coding sequences using ...

In prokaryotes, reverse transcriptases (RTs) — which catalyse the transcription of RNA into DNA — serve important roles in genomic mobility, adaptation and evolution. Several RTs have been associated ...

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and collaborators at the University of Bristol, KU Leuven, and the NIHR BioResource, have identified a neurodevelopmental disorder, caused ...

A long-overlooked stretch of the human genome appears to play a distinct role in shaping the social and stereotypic repetitive behaviors that define autism spectrum disorder (ASD), without affecting ...

Researchers discover that messenger RNA discarded by laboratories is the biological key to preventing essential proteins from ...

Cells are defined by the genes they express. In human cells, there are thousands of different protein coding genes, and the expression of those genes is carefully orchestrated and controlled by a ...

Researchers have revealed that so-called ‘junk DNA’ contains powerful switches that help control brain cells linked to Alzheimer’s disease. When people picture DNA, they often imagine a set of genes ...

The function of non-coding RNA in the cell has long been a mystery to researchers. Unlike coding RNA, non-coding RNA does not produce proteins—yet it exists in large quantities. A research team from ...

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) are a type of RNA molecule that do not carry instructions to make proteins. Instead, they influence how other genes are expressed. There are tens of thousands of lncRNAs ...