In 1862, Victor Hugo reportedly wrote to his publisher to ask how his newly published novel Les Misérables was selling, with a single character query: “?” The response: “!” This story of one of the ...

Nearly 25 years after scientists completed a draft human genome sequence, many of its 3.1 billion letters remain a puzzle. The 98% of the genome that is not made of protein-coding genes — but which ...

The puzzle seems impossible: take a three-billion-letter code and predict what happens if you swap a single letter. The code we’re talking about—the human genome—stores most of its instructions in ...

Vast swathes of the human genome remain a mystery to science. A new AI from Google DeepMind is helping researchers understand how these stretches of DNA impact the activity of other genes. While the ...

One of the most detailed 3D maps of how the human chromosomes are organized and folded within a cell's nucleus is published in Nature. Chromosomes are thread-like structures that carry a cell's ...

“The laws of inheritance are quite unknown,” Charles Darwin acknowledged in 1859. The discovery of DNA’s shape altered how we conceived of life itself. The X-ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin ...

Scientists have created a live-cell DNA sensor that reveals how damage appears and disappears inside living cells, capturing the entire repair sequence as it unfolds. Instead of freezing cells at ...