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. They carry genetic material, but they cannot make proteins on ...

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

In a new study, published in Cell, researchers describe a newfound mechanism for creating proteins in a giant DNA virus, comparable to a mechanism in eukaryotic cells. The finding challenges the dogma ...

Human DNA is not always making us function in ways we understand. Some of our genome is just there, and we’re not sure what it does. In fact, 8% of our DNA are viruses our ancestors caught one day and ...

A tiny, four-fingered "hand" folded from a single piece of DNA can pick up the virus that causes COVID-19 for highly sensitive rapid detection and can even block viral particles from entering cells to ...

Scientists at the University of Vienna, Austria, have screened great ape specimens obtained from natural history museums to identify DNA viruses. This groundbreaking study provides unique insights ...

New research reveals that triggering a cell’s DNA damage response could be a promising avenue for developing novel treatments against several rare but devastating viruses for which no antiviral ...