The origin of life on Earth has long been a mystery that has eluded scientists. A key question is how much of the history of life on Earth is lost to time. It is quite common for a single species to ...

Eight reactions could connect ancient Earth to modern day. Here's how. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A missing piece of Earth's ...

Metabolic “dark matter” describes currently unknown metabolic processes, which form a blind spot in our general understanding of metabolism and slow down the development of biosynthetic cell factories ...

Caltech researchers have identified a novel chemical reaction that could explain the formation of the building blocks of DNA ...

Life depends on remarkable arrays of biochemical reactions. Understanding the workings of biomolecules involves real-time monitoring of these reactions. Happening in only tiny fractions of a ...

Clifford P. Brangwynne smashed the single-celled embryo between a microscope slide and a thin glass cover slip. Then he peered into the microscope to get a look at the cell, taken from a worm commonly ...

Enzymes catalyze the critical chemical reactions that help build and power living organisms. But chemists studying the origin of life on Earth face a vexing question: How did these metabolic reactions ...

A Northwestern Engineering synthetic biology research team has developed a method to selectively drive the fusion of lipid nanoparticles — an emerging carrier for therapeutics — resulting in protein ...

Scientists at the University of Basel report the development of a precisely controllable system for mimicking biochemical reaction cascades in cells. Using microfluidic technology, the team produces ...

In the study of complex biochemical systems, model reduction offers a powerful framework to distil high-dimensional reaction networks into simpler, more tractable representations without sacrificing ...

Life evolved from simple geochemical processes present on the early Earth. However, the details of this transformation remain a mystery. In this study, researchers modeled the emergence of metabolic ...