A team of physicists has devised a novel strategy that uses naturally occurring motions inside the human cell nucleus to measure the physical properties of the nucleus and its components.
DNA molecules that follow specific instructions could offer more precise molecular control of synthetic chemical systems, a discovery that opens the door for engineers to create molecular machines with new and complex behaviors.
Life’s primordial soup could have been ice-cold.
The new technique offers a less permanent way to edit the genome.
In a paper published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, University of Houston Professor Dan Graur says that the functional portion of the human genome probably falls between 10% and 15%, with an upper limit of 25%. These figures are very different from one (about 80%) given in 2012 by the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, but more optimistic than the 2014 estimate (8.2%) by Rands et al.
Life begins with a bang.
Many of the secrets of cancer and other diseases lie in the cell’s nucleus. But getting way down to that level—to see and investigate the important genetic material housed there—requires creative thinking and extremely powerful imaging techniques.
Research led by the University of St Andrews and published yesterday (Monday 6 February) in Nature – provides new insight into how life evolved alongside changes in the chemistry of Earth’s surface.
A study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has found a surprising role for what had been considered a nonfunctional “junk” RNA molecule: controlling the cellular response to stress.
Earth’s very first living things may have relied on RNA to store genetic information
