The story of life’s beginnings gets stranger when you look closely at viruses. These tiny entities seem to sit at the edge of biology.

A giant DNA virus pulled from a Japanese freshwater pond is forcing scientists to rethink how complex cells first acquired their defining feature: the nucleus. Named ushikuvirus, the newly ...

Researchers have created a method called optovolution that uses light to guide the evolution of proteins with dynamic behaviors. By engineering yeast cells so their survival depended on proteins ...

A research team led by Sahand Jamal Rahi at EPFL’s Laboratory of the Physics of Biological Systems has introduced a new ...

EPFL researchers have developed a light-based method that can produce proteins that switch states, respond to signals, and even compute, using light and the cell cycle.

Centromeres play virtually the same central role across the entire tree of life: They ensure the faithful segregation of chromosomes during cell division. Yet the striking diversity in centromere ...

Scientists may have a step forward in understanding how life on our planet came to exist. The mystery of how tiny molecules of RNA came to be enclosed within membranes, forming the very first cells, ...

Cancer does not develop overnight. It can take decades for cancer-promoting changes in the genome to eventually lead to the formation of a malignant tumor. Researchers at the German Cancer Research ...

A review examines the prevailing theory of cancer evolution. The authors highlight both practical and theoretical limitations of the clonal model of cancer evolution and propose areas for improving ...