RNA

Cells across the tree of life can swap short-lived messages encoded by RNA — missives that resemble a quick text rather than a formal memo on letterhead.

Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer searches museum jars for genetic traces of flu, measles and other viruses. Their evolutionary stories can help treat modern outbreaks and prepare for future ones.

Highly repetitive regions of junk DNA may be the key to a newly discovered mechanism for gene regulation.

Recent efforts to map every cell in the human body have researchers floored by unfathomable diversity, with many thousands of subtly different types of cells in the human brain alone.

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries leading to mRNA vaccines, such as those that protect against Covid-19.

The biochemist Nick Lane thinks life first evolved in hydrothermal vents where precursors of metabolism appeared before genetic information. His ideas could lead us to think differently about aging and cancer.

Without a good definition of life, how do we look for it on alien planets? Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist, and Sheref Mansy, a chemist, to learn more.

How did life arise on Earth? Steven Strogatz speaks with the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak and Betül Kaçar, a paleogeneticist and astrobiologist, to explore our best understanding of how we all got here.

RNA and peptides coevolving in the primordial world might have jointly served as a precursor to the modern ribosome.