In the avalanche of research being generated on the human microbiome, it’s important to take a step back and think about the many basic facts of the system that we don’t know anything about. One ...

Simulating molecular evolution in the laboratory, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have produced an enzyme that could shed light on the origins of life, and also point the way to a new ...

Enzymes are the molecular machines that power life; they build and break down molecules, copy DNA, digest food, and drive ...

In biology, enzymes have evolved over millions of years to drive chemical reactions. Scientists have now derived universal rules to enable the de novo design of optimal enzymes. As an example, they ...

Whether they are laundry detergents, mascara, or Christmas chocolate, many everyday products contain fatty acids from palm ...

Mimicking natural evolution in a test tube, scientists have devised an enzyme with a unique property that might have been crucial to the origin of life on Earth. Mimicking natural evolution in a test ...

The addition of ubiquitin (Ub) and ubiquitin-like (Ubl) modifiers to proteins serves to modulate function and is a key step in protein degradation, epigenetic modification and intracellular ...

A core mission of glycobiology is to decipher the physiological roles of mammalian glycans. However, because glycan structure is encoded indirectly through the location and activities of glycan ...

Using enzymes to break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET)—otherwise known as plastic—has shown great promise over the last few years, sparked by the 2016 discovery of a bacterium that grows on PET ...

Cannabis has been part of human culture for thousands of years, yet the molecular machinery that gives the plant its ...