For decades, biologists have known that the instructions for life are written in DNA, yet the vast majority of those letters seemed to sit in the dark, doing little that was obvious. Now a new ...

Almost 1,500 genes have been implicated in intellectual disabilities; yet for most people with such disabilities, genetic causes remain unknown. Perhaps this is in part because geneticists have been ...

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and collaborators at the University of Bristol, KU Leuven, and the NIHR BioResource, have identified a neurodevelopmental disorder, caused ...

A long-overlooked stretch of the human genome appears to play a distinct role in shaping the social and stereotypic repetitive behaviors that define autism spectrum disorder (ASD), without affecting ...

Researchers have revealed that so-called ‘junk DNA’ contains powerful switches that help control brain cells linked to Alzheimer’s disease. When people picture DNA, they often imagine a set of genes ...

A newly discovered code within DNA—coined "spatial grammar"—holds a key to understanding how gene activity is encoded in the human genome. Transcription factors, the proteins that control which genes ...

The function of non-coding RNA in the cell has long been a mystery to researchers. Unlike coding RNA, non-coding RNA does not produce proteins—yet it exists in large quantities. A research team from ...

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) are a type of RNA molecule that do not carry instructions to make proteins. Instead, they influence how other genes are expressed. There are tens of thousands of lncRNAs ...

Researchers discover that messenger RNA discarded by laboratories is the biological key to preventing essential proteins from ...