We have gone further than ever before in creating life that is unlike anything that has evolved naturally. The genome of an Escherichia coli bacterium has been redesigned on a computer to use just 57 ...

An illustration of E. coli. Scientists have been racing to shrink the genetic code of this bacterium. Kateryna Kon / Science Photo Library via Getty Images The DNA of nearly all life on Earth is made ...

The DNA of nearly all life on Earth contains many redundancies, and scientists have long wondered whether these redundancies served a purpose or if they were just leftovers from evolutionary processes ...

Combining MAGE with CAGE allowed the genome to manipulated as an editable and evolvable template. Scientists have combined a recently developed technique known as multiplex automated genome ...

In a giant feat of genetic engineering, scientists have created bacteria that make proteins in a radically different way than all natural species do. By Carl Zimmer At the heart of all life is a code.

Liquid culture flasks of bacteria grown in yellow broth covered with tinfoil on a shaker. Bacterial strains needed to be tested every step of the way to create the highly compressed genome. Credit: ...

DNA is admired for its perfection as a programmable information molecule: it uses repeating polymerization chemistry to link four nucleotide building blocks (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) ...

61 codons specify one of the 20 amino acids that make up proteins 3 codons are stop codons, which signal the termination of protein synthesis Importantly, the genetic code is nearly universal, shared ...

The DNA of nearly all life on Earth is made up of 64 codons, each one a sequence of three nucleotide bases, the building blocks of DNA. These codons contain instructions for building amino acids, ...