Replication, heredity, and evolution are characteristic of Life. We and others have postulated that the reconstruction of a synthetic living system in the laboratory will be contingent on the ...

For decades, scientists have known that bacteria can exchange genetic material, in a process called horizontal gene transfer. This allows bacteria to rapidly evolve new traits, such as antibiotic ...

Directed evolution methods face trade-offs between the control of discrete approaches and the throughput of modern continuous systems. Here, we engineered a method called lytic selection and evolution ...

When Charles Darwin first proposed how evolution works in 1859, it seemed plausible. Tiny changes stack up over time, eventually leading a species to become something entirely different. Aside from ...

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

The genome structure—how genes are organized within DNA sequences in an organism—is fundamental to the processes and functions of organisms. A team at the University of Tokyo has developed a system to ...

In the early 1980s, David Gilmour, now an emeritus biochemistry and molecular biology professor at Pennsylvania State University, joined the laboratory of geneticist and biochemist John Lis as a ...

Scientists at the University of Vienna, Austria, have screened great ape specimens obtained from natural history museums to identify DNA viruses. This groundbreaking study provides unique insights ...

Most animals straightforwardly inherit their genetic material. DNA passes from parent to offspring, generation after ...