transfer RNA
Adding Letters to the DNA Alphabet
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: William B. Kiosses
The recipes for life, going back billions of years to the earliest single-celled organisms, are encoded in a DNA alphabet of just four letters. But is four as high as the DNA code can go? Or, as researchers have long wondered, is it chemically and biologically possible to expand the DNA code by a couple of letters?
A team of NIH-funded researchers is now answering these provocative questions. The researchers recently engineered a semi-synthetic bacterium containing DNA with six letters, including two extra nucleotides [1, 2]. Now, in a report published in Nature, they’ve taken the next critical step [3]. They show that bacteria, like those in the photo, are not only capable of reliably passing on to the next generation a DNA code of six letters, they can use that expanded genetic information to produce novel proteins unlike any found in nature.
