UC Berkeley scientists discovered that a microbe can interpret the UAG stop codon in two ways, producing different proteins ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 ...

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 ...

The DNA inside of living organisms is packed with information, so much so that it's hard to search genetic databases, but ...

In the largest screen to date for alternative genetic codes, a computer program named Codetta scanned more than 250,000 genome sequences from bacteria and archaea to identify five never-before-seen ...

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 ...

Scientists trace Leonardo da Vinci's DNA through his descendants and family tombs to reconstruct his genetic code.

The genetic code is a set of rules defining how the four-letter code of DNA is translated into the 20-letter code of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. The genetic code is a set ...

All living things on Earth use a version of the same genetic code. Every cell makes proteins using the same 20 amino acids. Ribosomes, the protein-making machinery within cells, read the genetic code ...