For decades, biologists have known that the instructions for life are written in DNA, yet the vast majority of those letters seemed to sit in the dark, doing little that was obvious. Now a new ...

Almost 1,500 genes have been implicated in intellectual disabilities; yet for most people with such disabilities, genetic causes remain unknown. Perhaps this is in part because geneticists have been ...

Typically, the information encoded in DNA allows organisms to develop, function, and pass traits across generations. Yet DNA ...

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and collaborators at the University of Bristol, KU Leuven, and the NIHR BioResource, have identified a neurodevelopmental disorder, caused ...

Researchers have revealed that so-called ‘junk DNA’ contains powerful switches that help control brain cells linked to Alzheimer’s disease. When people picture DNA, they often imagine a set of genes ...

Cells are defined by the genes they express. In human cells, there are thousands of different protein coding genes, and the expression of those genes is carefully orchestrated and controlled by a ...

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and others have identified a neurodevelopmental disorder, caused by mutations in a single gene, that affects tens of thousands of people ...

We tend to think of the DNA strands that contain our genetic code as consistent, stable units. But in reality, the cells that ...

Most hypotheses suggest that earlier forms of life had partial genetic codes and used fewer than 20 amino acids. To test these hypotheses, a team from Columbia and Harvard decided to see if they could ...

The function of non-coding RNA in the cell has long been a mystery to researchers. Unlike coding RNA, non-coding RNA does not produce proteins—yet it exists in large quantities. A research team from ...