It has long been thought that two enzymes, the kinases CDC7 and CDK2, are both needed to trigger DNA replication in mammalian cells. This view is challenged by evidence that offers a revised view of ...

Tsukuba, Japan—Mitochondria are intracellular organelles that evolved from a bacterium belonging to Alpharoteobacteria, which was taken up as an endosymbiont by the common ancestor of eukaryotes.

DNA is the most fundamental building block of life on earth. All genetic information organisms need to function, grow, and reproduce are stored inside of their DNA. Biochemists from the University of ...

Aging, neurological diseases and our bodies' stress response are all linked to the tiny power plants inside each cell known as mitochondria. To function properly, mitochondria must first read ...

CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—is the microbial world’s answer to adaptive immunity. Bacteria don’t generate antibodies when they are invaded by a pathogen and then ...

A new study has illuminated an important process that occurs during cell division and is a likely source of DNA damage under some circumstances, including cancer. A new study from scientists at the ...

The human genome consists of 3 billion base pairs, and when a cell divides, it takes about seven hours to complete making a copy of its DNA. That's almost 120,000 base pairs per second. At that ...

DNA is the molecular basis of heredity, the inherited traits that pass between generations in a person's family tree. Embodied in the sequence of base pairs, DNA carries information between ...

Many writers grouse when an editor makes a change in a story, but the consequences of changing a single word usually aren’t that dire. Not so with genetic instructions for making proteins. Even a ...