It's tricky to make an exact copy of yourself. Or at least it is for cells undergoing mitosis, where cells replicate everything inside of them, including their neatly packaged DNA, then split in half.

Scientists have discovered a new property of the molecular motors that shape our chromosomes. While six years ago they found that these so-called SMC motor proteins make long loops in our DNA, they ...

A cell copies all six billion letters of its DNA, gears up to split, and then simply… doesn’t. It sits there, swollen with ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising twist in how cells behave when division goes wrong. Sometimes a cell successfully copies its DNA but fails to split into two, leaving it with double the genetic ...

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 ...

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a safer and more precise way to study how genes function in living tissues by refining a recently developed CRISPR-based genetic technique in fruit ...

DNA is often called the blueprint of life, but what does that really mean? Elizabeth Worthey, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Genetics in the Heersink School of Medicine, explains everything ...

Neil Hunter, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, has discovered a crucial step in how chromosomes stay connected during the development for egg cells and sperm, ...

Genes are segments of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that are located inside every human cell. The DNA inside each cell is tightly coiled in structures called chromosomes. Each chromosome contains a ...

Six men scattered across Italy share something extraordinary with Leonardo da Vinci: the same Y chromosome that passed, father to son, through at least 15 generations of the da Vinci family.