On May 27, 1961, Heinrich Matthaei, a postdoc working with NIH scientist Marshal Nirenberg, placed synthetic polyuracil RNA into 20 test tubes to see what it would produce. Each tube contained ...

AAAS ANNUAL SCIENCE MEETING:SCIENTISTS ARE reading the genetic code of cancer to learn its secrets and find powerful new ways to destroy it. The initiative is based on mapping the genetic blueprint of ...

This circular diagram represents the genetic code, showing how the four nucleotide bases of RNA (adenine [A], cytosine [C], guanine [G], and uracil [U]) form codons that specify amino acids. Each ...

In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick published the molecular structure of the biological hereditary material deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) whose famous double-helical structure is now imprinted in the ...

DNA consists of a code language comprising four letters which make up what are known as codons, or words, each three letters long. Interpreting the language of the genetic code was the work of ...

Scientists have long believed that a universal genetic code serves as a blueprint for all life on Earth, dictating the structure and function of organisms from the simplest bacteria to complex humans.

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function. But how and why did it come to be the way it is? Subscribe ...