The traditional explanation of the initial genetic code in life seems less established when ancient proteins seem to be recalling some other arrangement of amino-acids. A recent examination of protein ...

Life runs on instructions you never see. Every cell reads DNA, turns that message into RNA, and then builds proteins that ...

Scientists now question how life’s building blocks first appeared before LUCA, reshaping our search for life beyond Earth.

Ancient evidence suggests a new twist in how we all got here.

The findings, which detail how amino acids shaped the genetic code of ancient microorganisms, shed light on the mystery of how life began on Earth. "You see the same amino acids in every organism, ...

Hidden within the genetic code lies the "triplet code," a series of three nucleotides that determine a single amino acid. How did scientists discover and unlock this amino acid code? Once the budding ...

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) report in an upcoming article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society their synthesis of a form of the bacterium Escherichia coli with a ...

With only rare exceptions, every organism constructs proteins from just 20 building blocks called amino acids. Recently, however, researchers modified Escherichia coli bacteria so that the ...

Biochemists shed light on the evolution of our 20- amino acid toolbox. The genetic code of life depends mainly on 20 amino acids, which can be arranged in various combinations to form proteins. For ...

Humans possess six forms of the protein actin, which perform essential functions in the body. Two in particular, β-actin and γ-actin, are nearly identical, only differing by four amino acids. Yet ...

Membrane proteins play important roles in health and disease, but they are so hydrophobic that they require detergents to maintain their shape outside membranes. That makes them difficult to study.