It has long been accepted that a gene's protein-coding information is contained in only one of its two DNA strands. But in 22 February Nature, Victor Corces and co-workers at the Department of Biology ...

Life runs on instructions you never see. Every cell reads DNA, turns that message into RNA, and then builds proteins that ...

Plasmids, small circular DNA molecules found in bacteria, may contain antibiotic-resistance genes and have the ability to replicate independently. Bacteria can transfer these plasmids to one another, ...

Scientists look at the base pairs that compose the "rungs" of the DNA ladder to determine a genome's sequence. The success of E. coli bacteria depends on their ability to multiply very rapidly by ...

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 ...