A team from University of Toronto Engineering is the first to synthesize long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) outside the cell—a new approach to drug discovery that has already yielded some promising ...

For thousands of years, people have been harvesting the bounty of the natural world. Plants and animals have, of course, provided people with food, but they have also supplied therapeutic remedies for ...

Scientists have been successfully reading the genome for the last 15 to 20 years, but two new papers provide the first hints that it may someday be possible to write genetic code as cheaply, ...

For the past 15 years, synthetic biologists have been figuring out how to synthesize an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. They've tackled the genomes of microbes, but now one ...

Baking a cake from scratch is a task deemed difficult for many. Constructing an artificial cell-like system from scratch, well that's another story. "Synthesizing cells from scratch is of fundamental ...

In this video segment, adapted from NOVA, reenactment footage portrays how chemist Percy Julian used careful observation, insight, and determination to search for a process for synthesizing the ...