The chemical origin of life on Earth is a puzzle that scientists have been trying to piece together for decades. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain how life came to be and what chemical and ...

Building such polymers is relatively easy due to the structural similarity of DNA and other nucleic acids, allowing them to bind naturally in a specific order. Using PNA “adapters” to bind these ...

The genetic basis for life on Earth may be stored in RNA and DNA, but scientists have now made six synthetic mimics of genetic material that are capable of recording, propagating, and evolving genetic ...

Introducing therapeutic nucleic acids into cells is a way to potentially fix the genetic causes of diseases such as Down’s syndrome and cystic fibrosis. Scientists have designed synthetic materials to ...

Scientists have been investigating properties of so-called xenonucleic acids or XNAs. They have demonstrated for the first time that six of these unnatural nucleic acid polymers are capable of sharing ...

DNA. The very acronym calls to mind the molecule’s exquisite structure, a linear double helix. Our understanding of DNA and its orbiting strands has thrown back the curtains on many diseases—cancer, ...

The only chemical difference between DNA and a synthetic cousin, GNA, is in the sugar molecule. GNA uses a three-carbon sugar called glycerol rather than the five-carbon deoxyribose used in DNA. The ...