Jun 09 2016
The existence of cancer is based on a fundamental process that occurs in an organism: cell division. A tumor cell breaks the rules of cell division that other cells follow. Cancer can only grow this way if some of the tumor suppressor genes – such as the p53 gene – get mutated in the cancer cells. Then, …
Sep 29 2015
For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that new genes simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions. Certain genes, however, have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. The mystery …
Dec 03 2014
Scientists have made a breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology by creating, for the first time, enzymes from artificial genetic material that does not exist in nature. This exciting new work not only offers new insights into the origins of life on Earth, but also has implications for our search for extraterrestrial life on …
Nov 05 2014
Over the years, there’s been plenty of back and forth over how much of our DNA is important – for decades much of it was thought of as “junk DNA”, but geneticists have gradually come to believe that some of these seemingly pointless segments of DNA may be crucial to regulating the rest of the …