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 ...

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 ...

Scientists first observed the biological phenomenon of restriction and modification in the 1950s, but they did not identify and isolate restriction enzymes until the late 1960s. 3 In 1970, Hamilton ...

Tarun Kapoor is tackling a deceptively tricky biochemical challenge: how to speed up the internal machinery of living cells.

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 ...

Enzymes are biomolecules that perform specialized functions, such as the assembly or degradation of small molecules. The small size of enzymes (tens of nanometres) previously limited their study to ...

Researchers have learned more about an enzyme that is key to helping cells repair DNA after it sustains damage. DNA has to be maintained for the health of an organism, and cells have molecules to fix ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American When I first began making bread, the science ...

We have solved the crystal structure of the Holliday junction resolving enzyme T7 endonuclease I at 2.1 Å resolution using the multiwavelength anomalous dispersion (MAD) technique. Endonuclease I ...