A team of researchers at Harvard University have modeled in the laboratory a primitive cell, or protocell, that is capable of building, copying and containing DNA.

As the cost of sequencing a single human genome drops rapidly, with one company predicting a price of $100 per person in five years, soon the only reason not to look at your "personal genome" will be fear of what bad news lies in your genes.

The protein XPD is one component of an essential repair mechanism that maintains the integrity of DNA.

Building faultless objects from faulty components may seem like alchemy. Yet scientists from the Weizmann Institute’s Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and Biological Chemistry Departments have achieved just that, using a mathematical concept called recursion.

Agarose gel electrophoresis" Most teenagers wouldn’t have a clue what this scientific term means, but middle school student Andrew Trigiano knows the protocol inside and out. When Andrew was 12, his father Robert Trigiano, a professor at the University of Tennessee, was looking for an interesting science project for his son.

Researchers from the United States and Switzerland have developed mathematical and statistical tools for reconstructing viral populations using pyrosequencing, a novel and effective technique for sequencing DNA. They describe their findings in an article published May 9th in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology.

In the rapid and fast-growing world of nanotechnology, researchers are continually on the lookout for new building blocks to push innovation and discovery to scales much smaller than the tiniest speck of dust.

Although letters representing the three billion pairs of molecules that form the “rungs” of the helical DNA “ladder” are routinely called the human “genetic code,” the DNA they comprise transmits traits across generations in a variety of ways, not all of which depend on the sequence of letters in the code.

Most of us are familiar with bar codes, those small black stripes with numbers below, known as the Universal Product Code or UPC label, that appear on commercial products. We scan them at the grocery store or to check a price, or have to cut them out and send them in for a rebate.

Until recently, the chemical marks littering the DNA inside our cells like trees dotting a landscape could only be studied one gene at a time.

A research team from the Department of Genetics, Physical Anthropology & Animal Physiology in the Faculty of Science and Technology at the Leioa campus of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), and led by Ms Concepción de la Rúa, has reconstructed the history of the evolution of human population and answered questions about history, using DNA extracted from skeleton remains.