Chromosomes are thread-like structures located inside the nucleus of animal and plant cells. Each chromosome is made of protein and a single molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Passed from ...

Researchers have made a surprising new discovery in the structure of the centromere, a structure that is involved in ensuring that chromosomes are segregated properly when a cell divides. Mistakes in ...

When a woman becomes pregnant, the outcome of that pregnancy depends on many things — including a crucial event that happened ...

One of the challenges of working with ancient DNA samples is that damage accumulates over time, breaking up the structure of the double helix into ever smaller fragments. In the samples we've worked ...

Among the many marvels of life is the cell's ability to divide and thus enable organisms to grow and renew themselves. For this, the cell must duplicate its DNA—its genome—and segregate it equally ...

A new method for visualising chromosomes is painting a truer picture of their shape, which is rarely like the X-shaped blob of DNA most of us are familiar with. Scientists at the BBSRC-funded Babraham ...

As the cell proceeds through the stages of cell division (from left to right: interphase, prometaphase, metaphase, and anaphase), chromosomes become progressively more compact through a combination of ...

Scientists have mapped out the molecular structure of a key part of our chromosomes called telomeres, which play a pivotal part in aging and cancer. Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, ...

Giorgia Guglielmi is a science journalist in Basel, Switzerland. The team also revealed the spatial organization of the mammoth’s DNA molecules and the active genes in its skin, including one ...

For decades, the Y chromosome – one of the two human sex chromosomes – has been notoriously challenging for the genomics community to sequence due to the complexity of its structure. Now, this elusive ...