DNA is often seen as the blueprint of life—carrying the code to govern the development and traits of an organism—but “there are things beyond the DNA sequence,” says Xiaoqi Feng, a plant geneticist at ...

Enzymes that cut DNA at specific sites are called endonucleases; these enzymes play many roles in genomic replication, fidelity, and defense. The initial discovery of restriction endonucleases in the ...

Under physiological conditions, most double-stranded nucleic acids adopt right-handed helical conformations such as B-DNA or A-RNA. However, under specific cellular stresses, nucleic acids can ...

Researchers from Durham University, Jagiellonian University (Poland) and the John Innes Center have achieved a breakthrough in understanding DNA gyrase, a vital bacterial enzyme and key antibiotic ...

Every cell type in the human body carries the same approximately 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA, yet a liver cell behaves nothing like a neuron. The epigenome explains this difference: in each cell, ...

CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—is the microbial world’s answer to adaptive immunity. Bacteria don’t generate antibodies when they are invaded by a pathogen and then ...

New analytical methods developed at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions have increased our understanding of how bacteria manage DNA. The methods have enabled researchers to ...

Researchers at the University of Bristol have caught DNA-copying enzymes generating long stretches of genetic code without any template to guide them, a behavior the team calls “doodling.” Published ...

Genome editing is a powerful biotechnology tool that allows scientists to make precise changes to an organism's DNA. It involves the use of specialized enzymes, known as engineered nucleases or ...