The problem of cell type became clear to genome biologist Jason Buenrostro in 2013. He was studying a cell line derived from someone with cancer, trying to map out how the DNA was arranged in the ...

Life’s fundamental structure is the cell, and so the main things that a cell does — processing biomolecules, growing, replicating its genetic material and producing a new body — are considered ...

Understanding the human cell is vital to progress in the life sciences and to human health. Cells are the smallest, most basic unit of life responsible for all of life’s processes. A typical human ...

For the first time, researchers have simulated the full workings of a bacterial cell as it copies its DNA and divides into two. The experiment could help researchers to understand how the interactions ...

I always wanted to understand life. What moves us? What allows us to heal and thrive? And what goes wrong when we get sick or when we eventually stop breathing and die? My search for answers to these ...

Scientist Kate Adamala doesn’t remember exactly when she realized her lab at the University of Minnesota was working on something potentially dangerous — so dangerous in fact that some researchers ...

The biological cycle of our existence seems relatively straightforward: we’re born, we live, we die. The end. But when you examine existence at the cellular level, things get a bit more interesting.

A group of researchers has won a large science prize for a discovery not quite two decades in the making. It was long thought that only simple microbes had mastered a chemical conversion reaction that ...

Five years ago, scientists watched in wonder as synthetic bacteria grew and split into daughter cells. The bacteria’s extremely stripped-down genome still supported its entire life cycle. It was a ...

A simulated cell in the early stages of division. Left half shows cytoplasm (blue cubes), mRNA degradation machinery molecules (pink), and sugar transporters (brown). Right half adds the membrane ...