The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of biology.

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

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 ...

Researchers have found hundreds of metabolic enzymes attached to human DNA inside the cell nucleus. Different tissues and cancers show unique patterns of these enzymes, forming a “nuclear metabolic ...

A fleeting DNA fold called i‑DNA can switch cancer‑related genes on and off, revealing a hidden structural weak point that ...

The retina is a thin layer of neural tissue at the back of the eye that detects light and converts it into signals, sent to the brain. During development, all the specialized neurons in the ...

By simulating the life cycle of a minimal bacterial cell—from DNA replication to protein translation to metabolism and cell ...

Getting DNA into a living cell sounds simple, until you remember the cell’s outer membrane acts like a guarded wall. DNA strands carry a negative charge, and they do not cross that wall easily. So for ...

Scientists have recently been learning more about the importance of small bits of circular genetic material known as extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA). These little circles of DNA can hitch a ride with ...

Cells were long believed to safeguard nuclear contents, releasing them only during cell death. Extracellular DNA was thought ...