The question of how life could have emerged is one of the most long-standing mysteries in science. In a new study, the laboratory of LMU Professor Dieter Braun has uncovered an unexpected form of ...

While humans have an esthetic liking for symmetry in everything, nature prefers asymmetric, single-handed forms when it comes to amino acids—the building blocks of proteins, and, by extension, all ...

Chemists at UCL have shown how two of biology’s most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of life four billion years ...

Inside every cell, a finely tuned metabolic network determines when to build, recycle, or stop producing essential molecules.

The enzyme RNA polymerase II transcribes genes into messenger RNA. This process is guided by modifications to the enzyme's "tail" called phosphorylation patterns.