In a way, sequencing DNA is very simple: There's a molecule, you look at it, and you write down what you find. You'd think it would be easy—and, for any one letter in the sequence, it is. The problem ...

When we think about genetic inheritance, we usually leap to DNA, the four-letter code containing the instructions for building a living organism. Scientists know that DNA encodes everything from hair ...

Few ideas in modern biology have captured the public imagination quite like epigenetics. The promise is seductive: chemical ...

For decades, the hunt for the genetic roots of common disease has focused overwhelmingly on single-letter changes in the DNA ...

New technological advancements have allowed us to look at the entire human genome. The genome is the complete set of genetic information encoded in the DNA. Human DNA has around three billion letters ...

In 1995, with the Human Genome Project underway, sequencing was all the rage. Scientists working on the project cloned short fragments of the whole genome and used Sanger sequencing to determine the ...

DNA barcoding is a way to identify a species by its genetic sequence. DNA from an organism is matched to a DNA barcode, which is a short fragment of DNA from a specific gene. A DNA barcode is like a ...

Metal ions bridging the grooves of two DNA helices explain how they lock together, the first direct look at the DNA zipper ...

The newest DNA sequencing technology from Swiss multinational Roche doesn’t measure DNA directly but in fact analyzes a different polymer altogether. The technology is not yet available for sale, but ...