Pyrrolysine is an important component of methyltransferase enzymes, which the archaea use to metabolize methylamine in the environment. “The need for that metabolism and availability of the machinery ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

The genetic code is not frozen. Genetic code variations found in microorganisms include codon bias, codon reassignment, ambiguous decoding and natural genetic code expansion. Codon bias, which is ...

An international team led by Monash University researchers has uncovered the genetic code governing the way genetic mutations affect mRNA and result in disease. This breakthrough, detailed in a new ...

The same amino acid can be encoded by anywhere from one to six different strings of letters in the genetic code. Andrzej Wojcicki/Science Photo Library via Getty Images Nearly all life, from bacteria ...

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 ...

Scientists at USC have definitively demonstrated that large sets of variations in the genetic code that do not individually appear to have much effect can collectively produce significant changes in ...

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 ...

The genetic code is a set of instructions that direct the translation of DNA into 20 amino acids, the basic units of proteins in living cells. The genetic code is made up of codons, which are ...

Alternative genetic decoding can be either a global phenomenon that affects the decoding of most or all mRNAs, or a local recoding that affects particular sites in a few mRNAs. Global alterations in ...

For more than 50 years, the RNA remained hidden in a lymph node that had been snipped out of a 38-year-old man in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That nub of tissue, the size of a ...