One of the striking things about the genetic code is the remarkable way it twists back on itself, combining redundancy and utility in a simple, elegant language. Many of us are introduced to the basic ...

A new examination of the way different tissues read information from genes has discovered that the brain and testes appear to be extraordinarily open to the use of rare codons to produce a given ...

Living things, from bacteria to humans, depend on a workforce of proteins to carry out essential tasks within their cells. Proteins are chains of amino acids that are strung together according to ...

The encoding of two non-universal amino acids involves dynamic redefinition of 'stop' signals in the genetic code. Bacteria with multiple proteins containing these amino acids add to our appreciation ...

A form of life that uses a fresh genetic “language” could be just a few years away. This comes after geneticists used a new technique to recode 5 per cent of the Salmonella bacterium’s genome, ...