Zettabytes—that’s 10 21 bytes—of data are currently generated every year. All of those cat videos have to be stored somewhere, and DNA is a great storage medium; it has amazing data density and is ...

In a way, sequencing DNA is very simple: There's a molecule, you look at it, and you write down what you find. You'd think it would be easy—and, for any one letter in the sequence, it is. The problem ...

All the cells in an organism have the exact same genetic sequence. What differs across cell types is their epigenetics-meticulously placed chemical tags that influence which genes are expressed in ...

In 2022, researchers shared that they had uncovered an ancient ecosystem from sediments in the Kap København Formation in Greenland (Nature 2022, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05453-y). By sequencing DNA ...

A graphic representation of a round, lumpy, blue protein and a single, comblike, purple strand of RNA interacting with a twisted, double, blue strand of DNA that separates where it meets the RNA. A ...

“We’re only just beginning to understand the full majesty of life on Earth,” wrote the founding members of the Earth BioGenome Project in 2018. The ambitious project raised eyebrows when first ...

While tools like CRISPR have blown the field of genome hacking wide open, being able to predict what will happen when you tinker with the code underlying the living things on our planet is still ...

The NovaSeq X Plus is a half-ton machine that looks like an industrial freezer, with a big touchscreen on top and racks to hold cartridges of chemicals below. Its job is to simultaneously sequence 128 ...