The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of biology.

In Lake Malawi, hundreds of species of cichlid fish have evolved with astonishing speed, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study how biodiversity arises.

Researchers have created a method called optovolution that uses light to guide the evolution of proteins with dynamic behaviors. By engineering yeast cells so their survival depended on proteins ...

Most people alive today carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. Now scientists are gaining a more intimate ...

Scientists have uncovered how brewer’s yeast developed its unusually tiny centromeres, the DNA regions that guide chromosome separation during cell division. By studying related yeast species, ...

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to ...

Knowing how human DNA changes over generations is essential to estimating genetic disease risks and understanding how we evolved. But some of the most changeable regions of our DNA have been ...

Evolution is perhaps the most extraordinary story ever told—a tale spanning billions of years that connects every living thing on Earth through an intricate ...

EPFL researchers have developed a light-based method that can produce proteins that switch states, respond to signals, and even compute, using light and the cell cycle.

Discover the latest news, features and articles about the origin of the human species and what makes us different from our ...