DNA tagged posts

Earth may be habitable because it got unbelievably lucky with its chemistry from the very start.

Earth may have won a cosmic chemistry lottery. Researchers found that during the planet’s earliest formation, oxygen had to be in an extremely narrow “Goldilocks zone” for two life-essential elements, phosphorus and nitrogen, to stay where life could use them. Too much or too little oxygen, and those ingredients could be lost or trapped deep inside the planet. This could reshape the search for life by showing that water alone is not enough.

Life cannot begin on a planet unless certain chemical elements are available in large enough amounts. Two of the most important are phosphorus and nitrogen...

All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu, scientists said Monday.

The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu, suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system.

One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago.

The asteroids that hurtle through our solar system give scientists a rare chance to study this possibility.

In 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off on a 300-million-kilometer...

New research published in Nature Communications has linked a normal cellular process to an accumulation of DNA mutations in cancer and identified cancer-driving mutations in an underexplored part of the genome.

Led by Dr. Jüri Reimand of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), the study centers around a protein called TOP2B, part of a family of enzymes that serve an important function in cells and are targets of common cancer chemotherapies.

Strands of DNA are long and complex, and they often get looped and tangled. When that happens, TOP2B and other topoisomerase proteins make cuts to DNA strands to help untangle and repair them...

Human artificial chromosomes (HACs) capable of working within human cells could power advanced gene therapies, including those addressing some cancers, along with many laboratory applications, though serious technical obstacles have hindered their development. Now a team led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has made a significant breakthrough in this field that effectively bypasses a common stumbling block.

In a study published in Science, the researchers explained how they devised an efficient technique for making HACs from single, long constructs of designer DNA...