There are some genes that can promote cancer; they are sometimes called oncogenes, and in tumor cells, mutations are often found in these genes. When they are functioning normally, oncogenes are often ...

Despite progress in defining functional elements of noncoding DNA, it is still not fully understood. Researchers, using an experiment that elucidated the function of tens of thousands of noncoding ...

From the time we are conceived and through old age, genetic mutations accumulate in all our tissues, eluding the body’s typically efficient DNA repair machinery and potentially affecting our health ...

Mitochondria act as energy factories in cells and have their own, separate DNA. Mutations to mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have been observed in cancer, but it has been unclear how these changes might ...

While most known types of DNA damage are fixed by our cells' in-house DNA repair mechanisms, some forms of DNA damage evade repair and can persist for many years, new research shows. This means that ...

New research published in Nature Communications into hidden mutations in mitochondrial DNA has uncovered how high mutational levels coincide with later life and link to aging markers. Mitochondria are ...

Bowel cancer cells have the ability to regulate their growth using a genetic on-off switch to maximize their chances of survival, a phenomenon that's been observed for the first time by researchers at ...