Every time a cell divides, it must copy its entire genome so that each daughter cell inherits a complete set of DNA. During that process, enzymes known as polymerases race along the DNA to copy its ...

As DNA strands ravel and unravel in an intricate dance, one notable event takes center stage: replication. This process is essential to life, but the finer details of its orchestrated steps are still ...

Half a century ago, scientists Jim Watson and Alexey Olovnikov independently realized that there was a problem with how our DNA gets copied. A quirk of linear DNA replication dictated that telomeres ...

Not all DNA looks like the familiar double helix. Sometimes, parts of our genetic code fold into unusual shapes under certain conditions. One such structure known as a G-quadruplex (G4) looks like a ...

MSK researchers are shedding new light on G-quadruplexes, a type of secondary DNA structure that can cause DNA replication to stall. The structures are a potential therapeutic target in cancer. Image ...

Transposons are critical drivers of bacterial evolution that have been studied for many decades and have been the subject of Nobel Prize winning research. Now, researchers from Cornell University have ...

Our DNA is arranged into chromosomes that carry a kind of protective shield at their ends, called telomeres. These protective caps are crucial to the stability of chromosomes, and when telomeres ...

Since the dawn of the computer age, researchers have wrestled with two persistent challenges: how to store ever-increasing ...