One of the most elegant theories about the origins of life on our planet is that it was kick-started by a delivery from outer space. This idea suggests that prebiotic molecules—the building blocks of ...

Tryptophan, the essential amino acid behind the Thanksgiving myth that eating turkey can make you sleepy, has been found to exist on Bennu, a small asteroid that swings by our planet about every six ...

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the single life form that branched into ...

MIT scientists have found that an amino acid called cysteine can help the gut heal itself. In mouse studies, a cysteine-rich diet activated immune cells that release a molecule speeding up tissue ...

For decades, amino acids have been added to medical formulations like insulin as stabilizers: these small molecules keep proteins (i.e. larger particles) from interacting in undesirable ways. And for ...

Researchers demonstrated how amino acids could spontaneously attach to RNA under early Earth-like conditions using thioesters, providing a long-sought clue to the origins of protein synthesis. This ...

Amino acids are absolutely essential to our health—and for life itself. They are the so-called “building blocks” of proteins. They play a key role in the growth, repair, and maintenance of almost ...

Rolls of brightly colored plastic. After it is used and discarded, polylactic acid could be used as a feedstock for making the amino acid alanine. Credit: Shutterstock One of the simpler amino acids, ...

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, unveiled a new modular way to combine three mix-and-matchable molecular pieces into new amino acid derivatives using an engineered enzyme ...

When the skin is injured, a stem cell’s survival instincts kick in. New research reveals that a simple amino acid, serine, helps push stem cells to abandon hair growth in favor of wound healing, ...