Silk is smooth, strong, and biocompatible, making it a prized material for many applications. Scientists have tried all kinds of tricks to improve silk or imbue it with new properties: They have fed ...

The key idea behind our framework is that life produces molecules with purpose, while nonliving chemistry does not. Cells ...

Proteins are critical components of organisms that are used and arranged in specific ways. Genes are translated into proteins, which are made of amino acids, by cellular machinery. Synthetic ...

AlphaFold arrived as a technical moonshot that suddenly made protein structures feel like software rather than secrets of ...

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.

A new study finds that at least one Archaea has surprisingly flexibility when interpreting genetic code, which goes against a ...

Some experimental biologists think the key components that could allow life to survive beyond our planet might be found right here on Earth. Eric Mack has been a CNET contributor since 2011. Eric and ...

Evolution settled on a genetic code that uses four letters to name 20 amino acids. Synthetic biologists adding new bases to DNA will be free to improve on nature — if they can. With recent innovations ...

Adipose tissue plays important roles in regulating carbohydrate and lipid homeostasis, but less is known about the regulation of amino acid metabolism in adipocytes. Here we applied isotope tracing to ...

Dementia is an umbrella term for several age-related disorders that can cause cognitive problems such as dysfunction in communication, attention, memory, reasoning, or problem solving; it includes ...

An international and interdisciplinary team working at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has modeled the evolution of one of biology's most fundamental sets ...