The largest animals on Earth are turning out to be hosts to microscopic life that science had never cataloged. New research ...

In a quiet freshwater pond in Ibaraki Prefecture near Tokyo, researchers have pulled from the water a microscopic giant that is forcing biologists to rethink how complex life began. The newly ...

Viral DNA that is usually dismissed when sequencing the human genome could help to uncover useful information about complex ...

Scientists in Japan have discovered a previously unknown giant virus, offering new insight into this enigmatic category of viruses – and possibly also into the origins of multicellular life. The virus ...

The researchers took a “safety-first” approach. They deliberately excluded all viruses that infect humans or animals from the ...

DNA that humans acquired from ancient viruses plays a key role in switching parts of our genetic code on and off, a new study has found. Nearly half of the human genome consists of segments called ...

Human DNA is not always making us function in ways we understand. Some of our genome is just there, and we’re not sure what it does. In fact, 8% of our DNA are viruses our ancestors caught one day and ...

A team of researchers from Stanford University and the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California say they’ve created viruses with AI-designed DNA that can target and kill specific bacteria. And these ...

Researchers have reconstructed ancient herpesvirus genomes from Iron Age and medieval Europeans, revealing that HHV-6 has been infecting humans for at least 2,500 years. Some people inherited the ...

A new study in the journal Human Gene Therapy indicates that DNA impurities derived from plasmid and host cell DNA are encapsulated into recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) capsids as ...