If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in ...

An INRS team discovers a new family of enzymes capable of inducing targeted cuts in single-stranded DNA . A few years ago, the advent of technology known as CRISPR was a major breakthrough in the ...

A new method can test the activity of thousands of RNA enzymes, called ribozymes, in a single experiment. The "RNA world" hypothesis proposes that the earliest life on Earth may have been based on RNA ...

The "RNA world" hypothesis proposes that the earliest life on Earth may have been based on RNA - a single-stranded molecule similar in many ways to DNA - like some modern viruses. This is because, ...