On February 28, 1953, two scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, announced they had figured out the structure of DNA.

When DNA breaks, cells must repair it accurately to prevent harmful mutations. Researchers have discovered that during a key repair process called homologous recombination, the cell uses loops in its ...

For decades, scientists believed a fertilized egg’s DNA began as a shapeless mass, only organizing itself once the embryo switched on its genes. But new research reveals that the genome is already ...

DNA's iconic double helix does more than "just" store genetic information. Under certain conditions it can temporarily fold into unusual shapes. Researchers at Umeå University, Sweden, have now shown ...

A fleeting DNA fold called i‑DNA can switch cancer‑related genes on and off, revealing a hidden structural weak point that ...

They were hardly modest, these two brash young scientists who in 1953 declared to patrons of the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, that they had "found the secret of life." But James Watson and Francis ...

The genome is more than a linear code; it is a dynamic structure whose three-dimensional folding dictates how genes are regulated. Traditional sequencing technologies capture base-level variation but ...

How does DNA structure itself from the very first moments of life? A team of researchers has just observed that DNA adopts a defined three-dimensional architecture much more rapidly than ...

Comparison of a single-stranded RNA and a double-stranded DNA with their corresponding nucleobases. (Image: Wikimedia Commons, CC SA 3.0) The most common type of base pairing is the Watson-Crick base ...