In medicine and biotechnology, the ability to evolve proteins with new or improved functions is crucial, but current methods are often slow and laborious. Now, Scripps Research scientists have ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Directed evolution is a laboratory method that speeds up protein mutations to help create novel cancer and neurodegenerative disorder therapies. In a ...

Organisms that reach “peak fitness” still keep evolving, even with no external pressures pushing them towards survival.

Back when dinosaurs stomped the Earth, dinky mammals scurried about in their shadows. The little furballs, hiding out in underground burrows, provided a fresh niche for a novel reptile: the snake.

The process of evolution usually takes thousands, millions or even billions of years. But researchers have found a way to condense it into a matter of minutes using a method called 'directed evolution ...

Scientists have found that the human brain develops from two distinct cellular systems, suggesting that evolution fused together two ancient nervous systems with very different jobs. The discovery ...

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution states that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to ...

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to ...

Your smartphone probably matters more for your survival than your DNA. That’s the startling implication of new research suggesting humans are in the midst of a fundamental evolutionary shift, with ...

Schematic of the T7-ORACLE system. The genome is maintained by the non-mutagenic host replisome (gray), while an orthogonal T7 replisome (red) maintains only a dedicated plasmid (OR) at 100,000-fold ...