On May 27, 1961, Heinrich Matthaei, a postdoc working with NIH scientist Marshal Nirenberg, placed synthetic polyuracil RNA into 20 test tubes to see what it would produce. Each tube contained ...
Orangutans, mice, and horses are covered with it, but humans aren't. Why we have significantly less body hair than most other mammals has long remained a mystery. But a first-of-its-kind comparison of ...
The DNA of nearly all life on Earth contains many redundancies, and scientists have long wondered whether these redundancies served a purpose or if they were just leftovers from evolutionary processes ...
The DNA of nearly all life on Earth is made up of 64 codons, each one a sequence of three nucleotide bases, the building blocks of DNA. These codons contain instructions for building amino acids, ...
Provide each team with a copy of "The Hunt for mtDNA" student handout. Explain to students what mtDNA is, how it differs from nuclear DNA, and how it is inherited (see Activity Answer for more ...
Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make ...
Darwin's theory of evolution should be expanded to include consideration of a DNA stability 'energy code' -- so-called 'molecular Darwinism' -- to further account for the long-term survival of species ...
The origins of millions of tiny proteins in our bodies, previously assumed to be useless, have now been discovered. A study published on February 17 in the journal Molecular Cell describes how these ...