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 ...

A portion of our genome that was once dismissed as being “junk” may actually play an important role in regulating gene expression, new research suggests. According to the work of an international team ...

Repeats of DNA sequences, often referred to as 'junk DNA' or 'dark matter,' that are found in chromosomes and could contribute to cancer or other diseases have been challenging to identify and ...

In a way, sequencing DNA is very simple: There's a molecule, you look at it, and you write down what you find. You'd think it would be easy—and, for any one letter in the sequence, it is. The problem ...

All the cells in an organism have the exact same genetic sequence. What differs across cell types is their epigenetics-meticulously placed chemical tags that influence which genes are expressed in ...