For decades, biologists have known that the instructions for life are written in DNA, yet the vast majority of those letters seemed to sit in the dark, doing little that was obvious. Now a new ...

Almost 1,500 genes have been implicated in intellectual disabilities; yet for most people with such disabilities, genetic causes remain unknown. Perhaps this is in part because geneticists have been ...

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and collaborators at the University of Bristol, KU Leuven, and the NIHR BioResource, have identified a neurodevelopmental disorder, caused ...

Cells are defined by the genes they express. In human cells, there are thousands of different protein coding genes, and the expression of those genes is carefully orchestrated and controlled by a ...

Researchers have revealed that so-called ‘junk DNA’ contains powerful switches that help control brain cells linked to Alzheimer’s disease. When people picture DNA, they often imagine a set of genes ...

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and others have identified a neurodevelopmental disorder, caused by mutations in a single gene, that affects tens of thousands of people ...

A newly discovered code within DNA—coined "spatial grammar"—holds a key to understanding how gene activity is encoded in the human genome. Transcription factors, the proteins that control which genes ...

The function of non-coding RNA in the cell has long been a mystery to researchers. Unlike coding RNA, non-coding RNA does not produce proteins—yet it exists in large quantities. A research team from ...

Most hypotheses suggest that earlier forms of life had partial genetic codes and used fewer than 20 amino acids. To test these hypotheses, a team from Columbia and Harvard decided to see if they could ...

What keeps our cells the right size? Scientists have long puzzled over this fundamental question, since cells that are too large or too small are linked to many diseases. Until now, the genetic basis ...