The same amino acid can be encoded by anywhere from one to six different strings of letters in the genetic code. Andrzej Wojcicki/Science Photo Library via Getty Images Nearly all life, from bacteria ...

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 ...

UC Berkeley scientists discovered that a microbe can interpret the UAG stop codon in two ways, producing different proteins ...

In the largest screen to date for alternative genetic codes, a computer program named Codetta scanned more than 250,000 genome sequences from bacteria and archaea to identify five never-before-seen ...

Despite awe-inspiring diversity, nearly every lifeform—from bacteria to blue whales—shares the same genetic code. How and when this code came about has been the subject of much scientific controversy.

The genetic code is a set of rules defining how the four-letter code of DNA is translated into the 20-letter code of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. The genetic code is a set ...

Researchers have reconstructed a long string of genetic code for what they believe is the common ancestor of placental mammals — a shrewlike creature that lived in Asia more than 75 million years ago.

All living things on Earth use a version of the same genetic code. Every cell makes proteins using the same 20 amino acids. Ribosomes, the protein-making machinery within cells, read the genetic code ...

As wildly diverse as life on Earth is—whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in the Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot springs in ...

A surprising number of microbes use alternate genetic codes, different from the standard genetic code that governs the large majority of life. A census of these "recoded" genomes was recently reported ...

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 ...

Researchers have identified specific portions of the genetic codes of the COVID-19 and SARS viruses that may promote the viruses' lifecycles. The new technique is researchers' first tool for ...