DNA is the blueprint of the human body. However, tens of thousands of DNA lesions occur in our bodies every day. In ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A research group led by the University of Osaka has discovered that the DNA repair enzyme Polβ plays a crucial role in protecting the developing brain from harmful mutations. The study found that a ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...