The quest for a vaccine against HIV has been going on for about 40 years — almost as long as the virus that causes AIDS has been known to scientists and the public. There has been some progress ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. In 1957, just four years after Francis Crick and other scientists solved the riddle of ...

RNA in cells performs an astounding number of functions. Messenger RNA carries the sequences of active genes to cellular machinery that turns it into proteins. And transfer RNA molecules are an ...

Intracellular machines called ribosomes use messenger-RNA sequences to synthesize proteins. Investigations using single-molecule imaging and cryo-electron microscopy techniques reveal structural and ...

Messenger RNA carries genetic information from DNA in the highly protected nucleus out to the rest of the cell, where structures called ribosomes can build proteins according to the DNA blueprint.

Scientists have discovered that some tiny segments of RNA thought to be junk instead have a functional role in suppressing production of certain messenger RNAs and appear to help cells respond to ...

Exsilio Therapeutics has launched with $82 million in series A funding. Exsilio uses lipid nanoparticles and messenger RNA (mRNA) to integrate whole corrective genes into “safe harbors” in the ...

A new study, led by researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), identified tiny pieces of messenger RNA that are missing in pediatric high-grade glioma tumors but not in normal brain ...

When a protein is made, a chain of amino-acid residues is built on the basis of messenger RNA instructions, and this construction must be brought to a stop appropriately. Writing in Nature, Kachale et ...

Mahlon Hoagland, 87, a biologist, teacher and artist who discovered a key step in the process by which the genetic code is translated into living tissue, died Sept. 18 at his home in Thetford, Vt., of ...

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have trapped the ribosome, a protein-building molecular machine essential to all life, in a key transitional state that has long eluded ...

Initially dismissed as a wealthy and frivolous socialite, Charles Swann in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” eventually transforms from a minor figure to an important one. Were biology a novel, ...