Latest Articles
Drosophila melanogaster has one of the deepest research bases within the life sciences, with a wealth of high-quality tissue- and cell type-specific transcriptomic data available. However, integrating large datasets derived from disparate sources is not trivial. We have designed a broadly ...
BioPortal ( https://bioportal.bioontology.org ) is the world’s most comprehensive repository of biomedical ontologies. It provides infrastructure for finding, sharing, searching, and utilizing biomedical ontologies. Launched in 2005, BioPortal now includes 1549 ontologies (1182 of them public). Its ...
Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is a widely used technique to characterize the secondary structure composition of proteins. We have developed the Beta Structure Selection (BeStSel) method (PNAS, 112, E3095), which solves the main problem of protein CD spectroscopy—namely, the spectral ...
Accurate and accessible phylogenetic analysis is essential for understanding microbial taxonomy and evolution, which are integral to microbiology, ecology, and drug discovery, yet it remains a challenging task. AutoMLST2 ( https://automlst2.ziemertlab.com ) is a web server designed to facilitate ...
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) remains a critical challenge in public health and research. AmrProfiler is a comprehensive tool with three specialized modules: identifying acquired AMR genes, resistance-associated mutations, and ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene mutations across nearly 18 000 bacterial ...
Breakthrough Articles
There is enormous interest in generating proteins composed of monomers that are not ⍺-amino acids. Doing so in cells demands high levels of precisely acylated transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules. However it is exceptionally challenging to simultaneously determine precisely how much of a cellular tRNA is acylated, what it is acylated with, and whether it has been acylated once or twice. The assay ...
Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (ARSs) are crucial enzymes found in all living things. They help make proteins by attaching specific building blocks (amino acids) to tRNAs, molecules that deliver the building blocks to the site of protein production. When ARS’s make mistakes, they are fixed by special tRNA-editing proteins. In more complex organisms, ARSs assemble with other non-ARS proteins in the ...
Cells regulate their DNA through a network of proteins that shape chromatin structure and modify chemical markers. While many pathways have been studied individually, how they interact to maintain stability remains unclear. We investigated this by disrupting 200 genes involved in epigenetic regulation, one by one or in combination, to reveal their interactions. We found that most regulators are ...
RNA-mediated crop protection offers a promising alternative to harmful agrochemicals by using pathogen-derived double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) that are processed into small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) in plants. These siRNAs can silence viral genomes, but current dsRNAs are often ineffective. The authors have developed a method to identify effective siRNAs ( e siRNAs) against the Cucumber mosaic ...
The bacterial ProQ/FinO family of RNA-binding proteins influence major traits such as motility, horizontal gene transfer, virulence, and biofilm formation. However, molecular mechanisms explaining how these proteins influence RNA ligand activity has been lacking. This study proposes that ProQ/FinO proteins stabilize RNA by counteracting polyadenylation. The authors first show that ProQ promotes ...
Senior Executive Editors of Nucleic Acids Research
Julian Sale
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK
Barry Stoddard
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA
View full list of Editors & Editorial Board members
More from Nucleic Acids Research
Chromatin and Transcription in Nucleic Acids Research: Highlights from the First 50 Years
As part of NAR’s 50th anniversary celebration, this new collection offers a bird's-eye view on how discoveries in chromatin and transcription research unfolded over five decades, leading the two topics to be indissociably linked, as they are today.
Browse the collection
Breakthrough Articles
NAR's Breakthrough articles present high-impact studies answering long-standing questions in the field of nucleic acids research and/or open up new areas and mechanistic hypothesis for investigation.
Explore the best papers published with NAR
2025 Database Issue
The 2025 Nucleic Acids Research Database issue contains 185 papers, including 73 papers reporting on new databases and 101 updates from resources previously published in the issue. Eleven additional articles provide updates on databases most recently published elsewhere. The issue also includes a Breakthrough Article reporting on EXPRESSO, a multi-omics database to explore multi-layered 3D genomic organization.
View the issue
2024 Web Server issue
The 2024 Nucleic Acids Research Web Server issue is the 22nd in a series of annual issues dedicated to web-based software resources for analysis and visualization of molecular biology data. This issue includes 74 articles covering web servers that support research activities in a wide range of areas, ranging from software aimed at the wet lab through structural biology to computational methods.
View the issue
Publishing with Nucleic Acids Research
Nucleic Acids Research: 50 years of research for scientists by scientists
NAR's 50 years of forming relationships with our author community has allowed the journal to continue paving the way with cutting-edge, reputable research in the nucleic acids and protein fields.
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NAR was the first OUP journal to flip to fully open access
NAR embraces and endorses the principles of Open Science, a movement that promotes the unhindered access to scientific research. The benefits of publishing open access include:
- Greater visibility and impact of research
- Increased citation and usage
- Compliance with funder mandates
- Increased engagement with a more public audience
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Promote your published work with NAR
As the author, you are the best advocate for your work and we encourage you to be involved in promoting your publication! Sharing your ideas and news about your publication with your colleagues and friends could take as little as 15 minutes and will make a real difference in raising the profile of your research.
View OUP's self-promotion guide & learn how OUP also works to promote your content
Read and publish agreements
Oxford University Press has Read and Publish agreements with over 25 institutions and consortia around the world allowing affiliated researchers at participating institutions to:
- publish accepted articles open access in OUP journal, with their institutions covering the open access publication charge
- read high quality, high impact research from OUP's prestigious journals
Find out of your institution is participating
Article Types
Standard Research Articles
Standard research articles are published on a variety of subject categories including chemical biology and nucleic acid chemistry, computational biology, data resources and analyses, gene regulation, chromatin and epigenetics, molecular biology, RNA and RNA-protein complexes, structural biology and more.
Methods Articles
Nucleic Acids Research publishes methods manuscripts that detail methodological developments of highest originality and usefulness within NAR's core subject areas. Methods papers should report novel techniques, significant advances in existing techniques, and/or demonstration novel utility or advantage to an extended, rather than a specialist, audience.
Critical Reviews and Perspectives
Critical Reviews and Perspectives are dedicated to reviews relevant to the journal's core areas of interest in DNA/RNA function and the structure and interactions of proteins involved in nucleic acid interactions. These papers are by invitation only, but NAR welcomes unsolicited proposals.
Database & Web Server Articles
Nucleic Acids Research publishes two special online issues, a biological databases one in January of each year, and a web-based software resources of value to the biological community one in July of each year.
Database articles
Web Server articles
New members join NAR's Early Career Investigator Advisory Board!
The Early Career Investigator (ECI) Advisory Board for Nucleic Acids Research represents an esteemed group of ECIs working in physical, chemical, or biological aspects of nucleic acids. Our board work closely with the journal's Executive Editor team to ensure that NAR remains a leading, community-focused, and scientist-led resource for our next generation of researchers in this field. ECIs participate in a dedicated editorial mentoring scheme for a two-year term.
Meet the appointed members
Nobel Prize winning research from NAR authors
Congratulations to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman on being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
Read the NAR article cited as a key publication in this research, 'Incorporation of pseudouridine into mRNA enhances translation by diminishing PKR activation'.
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NAR sister titles
In addition to Nucleic Acids Research, the following two journals are published under the NAR umbrella following the same commitment to open access, reputable, and cutting-edge research for scientists by scientists.
- NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics - focuses on genomics and bioinformatics large-scale data analysis
- NAR Cancer - focuses on research at the intersection of the nucleic acids research and cancer fields
- NAR Molecular Medicine - focuses on research at the intersection of nucleic acids research and molecular medicine
