Edible cotton breakthrough may help feed the world

What started in a Petri dish like this one could ultimately provide protein for 500 million people every year (Image: Kathleen Phillips / Texas Agricultural Experiment Station)

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It's alive!! ...well almost

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the world will be changed by the ability to routinely read genetic sequences into computing systems and then store, replicate, alter and insert them back into living cells. More Articles

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Scientists in the United States have decoded the overall structure of the HIV virus genome that causes AIDS in humans, according to a study published Thursday. More Articles

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A self-assembling molecule synthesized in a laboratory may resemble the earliest form of information-carrying biological material, a transitional stage between lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life.

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A fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life on Earth has been replicated in a laboratory.

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The scalding hot waters surrounding deep-sea hydrothermal vents may harbor forms of life based on non-standard biochemistry. "One of the founding assumptions of astrobiology is that life is easy to form, and is therefore widespread in the universe," says cosmologist Paul Dav …

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Chemists in the United States have made an artificial DNA-like molecule that can change its sequence to bind to a DNA template without the help of enzymes. The findings could shed light on how molecules underpinning life were first able to emerge from a chemical soup.

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MIT and Boston University engineers have designed cells that can count and "remember" cellular events, using simple circuits in which a series of genes are activated in a specific order.

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CREATING life in the primordial soup may have been easier than we thought. Two essential elements of RNA have finally been made from scratch, under conditions similar to those that likely prevailed during the dawn of life.

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A fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life on Earth has been replicated in a laboratory.

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An English chemist has found the hidden gateway to the RNA world, the chemical milieu from which the first forms of life are thought to have emerged on earth some 3.8 billion years ago.

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An English chemist has found the hidden gateway to the RNA world, the chemical milieu from which the first forms of life are thought to have emerged on earth some 3.8 billion years ago. More Articles

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As described in an article published this week in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work demonstrates some of the classic principles of evolution.

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When the Human Genome Project was complete, DNA bowed out of the limelight and gave way to RNA as a major player in genetic regulation.

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The name most frequently associated with the quest to breathe life into inanimate matter is the pioneer of genome-sequencing, Craig Venter. He, however, begs to differ. "I keep trying to make it clear - we're not creating life from scratch," he says.

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A major mystery about the origins of life has been resolved.

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Scientists have long wondered how chemicals spontaneously came together to create proteins before life itself began.

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Darwin assumed that descent was exclusively "vertical", with organisms passing traits down to their offspring.

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Gerald Joyce, reiterated that while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not life as we know it.

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Scientists today who study the origin of life do not share Darwin's pessimism about our ability to reconstruct those early moments.

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A striking feature of many cancer cells is that the DNA in their chromosomes is all jumbled up. Chunks of DNA containing one or more genes have been ripped out of their chromosome and reinserted in a different place.

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"This thing shows that some viruses are organisms that have an ancestor that was much more complex than they are now," says Didier Raoult, one of the leaders of the research team at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France, that identified the virus.

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it appears to be the first time that entries in the online encyclopedia are being made a precondition of the research career's be-all and end-all: peer-reviewed publications.

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With the aid of a straightforward experiment, researchers have provided some clues to one of biology's most complex questions: how ancient organic molecules came together to form the basis of life.

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The copying of DNA's master instructions into messenger molecules of RNA, a process known as DNA transcription, has always been thought to be a unidirectional process whereby a copying machine starts and moves in one direction.

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