Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Delft University of Technology and the IMP Vienna Biocenter have discovered a new property of the molecular motors that shape our chromosomes. While six years ...

Before a cell divides, its DNA is replicated so that each daughter cell inherits the same genetic information. The two copies, known as "sister chromatids," are held together by a ring-shaped protein ...

Not all DNA looks like the familiar double helix. Sometimes, parts of our genetic code fold into unusual shapes under certain conditions. One such structure known as a G-quadruplex (G4) looks like a ...

Embryonic stem (ES) cells are pluripotent stem cells that can produce all cell types of an organism. ES cells proliferate rapidly and have been thought to experience high levels of intrinsic ...

Cells have evolved careful checks to ensure DNA is copied only once, but how they switch on replication at the right moment has been the focus of a 30-year research question. New work from the Crick ...

If you are anything like us, whenever you plan a journey, you spend a remarkable amount of time thinking about the start and the middle. Is everything packed? What time should we leave? Will there be ...

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been a critical turning point for life on Earth. For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the ...

It’s tricky to make an exact copy of yourself. Or at least it is for cells undergoing mitosis, where cells replicate everything inside of them, including their neatly packaged DNA, then split in half.

Scientists have discovered a new property of the molecular motors that shape our chromosomes. While six years ago they found that these so-called SMC motor proteins make long loops in our DNA, they ...