Replication, heredity, and evolution are characteristic of Life. We and others have postulated that the reconstruction of a synthetic living system in the laboratory will be contingent on the ...

For decades, scientists have known that bacteria can exchange genetic material, in a process called horizontal gene transfer. This allows bacteria to rapidly evolve new traits, such as antibiotic ...

Directed evolution methods face trade-offs between the control of discrete approaches and the throughput of modern continuous systems. Here, we engineered a method called lytic selection and evolution ...

In the early 1980s, David Gilmour, now an emeritus biochemistry and molecular biology professor at Pennsylvania State University, joined the laboratory of geneticist and biochemist John Lis as a ...

Most animals straightforwardly inherit their genetic material. DNA passes from parent to offspring, generation after ...

Some 4,000 years ago, as ancient civilizations such as the Minoans in Crete and the Neo-Sumerian Empire in Mesopotamia were shaping cultures in Europe and the Middle East, human biology itself was ...