The vast majority of the things we see, touch and use in our everyday lives are derived from petroleum, which provides the chemical building blocks for countless consumer staples. We have, however, ...

The key idea behind our framework is that life produces molecules with purpose, while nonliving chemistry does not. Cells ...

In findings that may shed light on the earliest days of evolutionary history, R. Graham Cooks and a team of Purdue chemists have reported experiments that suggest why all 20 of the amino acids that ...

WOULD YOU like the vanilla in your custard to come from a field of lovely orchids or a barrel of wood pulp? The second option may not seem as appetising, but synthetic vanillin, as vanilla’s ...

For a few weeks in 2017, Wanda Kukulski found herself binge-watching an unusual kind of film: videos of the insides of cells. They were made using a technique called cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) ...

The central dogma of molecular biology holds that DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which then gets translated into proteins. Of course, there are exceptions—some viruses, like coronaviruses, forego DNA ...

Water, organic molecules, and inorganic ions are the constituents of cells. Water constitutes the greatest fraction of the three, accounting for almost three-quarters of the total mass of a cell. The ...

The Department of Biological Sciences treats the life sciences in all their breadth and diversity, including the study of molecules, cells, whole organisms, ecosystems, plants, animals and ...

Northwestern University researchers almost three years ago introduced an injectable new therapy, which harnessed fast-moving “dancing molecules,” to repair tissues and reverse paralysis after severe ...

Certain biological molecules are able to move in a “quasi-mechanical” way, and these can be considered to be molecular machines. These are seen in many natural processes, and from this, ...