Half a century ago, scientists Jim Watson and Alexey Olovnikov independently realized that there was a problem with how our DNA gets copied. A quirk of linear DNA replication dictated that telomeres ...

Composed of both DNA and protein, telomeres are the specialized caps at the ends of linear chromosomes. The telomere's DNA contains hundreds of repetitions of a simple, short sequence (TTAGGG in ...

A new study led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and UPMC Hillman Cancer Center has shown that an enzyme called PARP1 is involved in the repair of telomeres, the lengths of DNA ...

Transposons are critical drivers of bacterial evolution that have been studied for many decades and have been the subject of Nobel Prize winning research. Now, researchers from Cornell University have ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The Hallmarks of Cancer are ten underlying ...