When you were first conceived, you were a single cell. From this basic fact, we can extrapolate a few things, most especially that all the cells that make up your body today came (indirectly) from ...

Researchers at EMBL Hamburg and collaborators at the Leibniz Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) have mapped ...

Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first time that feeds, grows and replicates like a natural cell, a breakthrough in synthetic biology.

All cells need to sense and respond to their environment, to know when to activate genes, build proteins, and carry out their basic functions. One of the most well-studied cellular responses is how ...

How does a single cell build a brain with billions of precisely organized neurons? Researchers suggest that brain cells use their lineage—their cellular family tree—as a kind of positional map. Cells ...

Cells may generate their own electrical signals through microscopic membrane motions. Researchers show that active molecular processes can create voltage spikes similar to those used by neurons. These ...

Cells carry their own growth switches. When enough nutrients—amino acids in particular—are available, cells flip this switch ...

A growing body of work suggests that cell metabolism — the chemical reactions that provide energy and building materials — plays a vital, overlooked role in the first steps of life. Each of us starts ...

In an amazing twist of fate, the aggressive cervical cancer tumor that killed Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year old African American mother, became an essential tool that helped the biomedical field flourish ...