The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

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 ...

Scientists at UC Berkeley have discovered a microbe that bends one of biology’s most sacred rules. Instead of treating a specific three-letter DNA code as a clear “stop” signal, this methane-producing ...

Industrial yeasts are a powerhouse of protein production, used to manufacture vaccines, biopharmaceuticals, and other useful compounds. In a new study, MIT chemical engineers have harnessed artificial ...

Most organisms on Earth have the same basic genetic code, but it comes with some flaws. Scientists sought to work out those errors by creating their own artificial genome, which replaced E. coli’s ...

Liquid culture flasks of bacteria grown in yellow broth covered with tinfoil on a shaker. Bacterial strains needed to be tested every step of the way to create the highly compressed genome. Credit: ...

Synthetic biologists from Yale were able to re-write the genetic code of an organism - a novel genomically recoded organism (GRO) with one stop codon - using a cellular platform that they developed ...

RNA therapeutics target translation rather than DNA, aiming to correct shared protein production errors. By enabling cells to read through premature stop codons, engineered tRNAs could restore ...