The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

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 ...

The genetic code acts as life’s instruction manual, telling cells how to build proteins from DNA and RNA. Though it's a marvel of molecular precision, the path it took to evolve remains unclear. Fresh ...

“Random DNA” is naturally active in the one-celled fungi yeast, while such DNA is turned off as its natural state in mammalian cells, despite their having a common ancestor a billion years ago and the ...

In an article published in the journal Nature Communications, scientists have studied a protein, called HP1, which is involved in organizing DNA. Present in both fission yeast and mammals, this ...

When Charles Darwin first proposed how evolution works in 1859, it seemed plausible. Tiny changes stack up over time, eventually leading a species to become something entirely different. Aside from ...

'Random DNA' is naturally active in the one-celled fungi yeast, while such DNA is turned off as its natural state in mammalian cells, despite their having a common ancestor a billion years ago and the ...

The often-mentioned fact that humans and chimpanzees are 99.9 percent identical in their DNA is hard to accept for some people, who can't comprehend how we could share so much of our basic genetic ...

DNA provides the foundational library of possibilities, but the environment serves as the librarian, choosing which books are ...

The Human Genome Project was an international scientific research project set out to map, identify, and sequence all the genes that make up the human genome, as well as improve the tools for data ...