If you had wanted a copy of some important book in the 15th century, it would have been reproduced by hand from an existing one. The...

In this post I present an example of ATP-driven protein motor movement. ATP is a frequently employed driver of protein movement in all...

Each time a cell divides, it creates a copy of both its genomes for the two daughter cells. It does so with extremely high accuracy (or...

A cell is a dynamic place. Enzymes are speeding up chemical reactions. DNA, RNA, and proteins are being synthesized. Molecular motors are...

Two human genomes adding up to 6 billion base pairs are contained in the nucleus of every cell in your body. Different kinds of cells use...

We've covered proteins: polymers of amino acids that fold up and perform most of the tasks in the cell. We've also covered DNA: a...

My last post covered the structure of DNA: what DNA is. In this post, I move on to function: what DNA does, or, maybe better, how DNA...

In this "Part I" post I'll be focusing on the structure of DNA--what DNA is. In the next, I'll cover how DNA functions--what it does....

Most of the time, most of your cells are simply doing their jobs. Neurons in your brain are sending electrochemical signals. Cardiac...

In the last post I likened a human cell to a factory and then I extended the analogy to characterize the major components of a cell. In...

A 30,000-foot view. Proteins account for about 50% of the cell's weight. That's much more than DNA, which accounts for 1-2%. It's also...

Analogies are ubiquitous in molecular biology. Traditionally, two analogies have been used to describe the cell: the cell as a factory...

Humans have known of the existence of cells since the 1600s when scientists (then called “natural philosophers”) used simple microscopes...