The finding was intriguing but seemed like an isolated case. Even so, because an organism’s survival depends on keeping its genetic alphabet and code intact, the precise ingredients in DNA’s recipe are thought to have been largely locked in by evolution for billions of years - making them “frozen accidents,” in the words of Francis Crick. Synthetic biologists like Romesberg have explored this by engineering artificial base pairs and additional amino acids to produce novel proteins. Perhaps there could have been more than four of them, or they could have had very different chemical or binding properties, or they could have used a different set of rules to represent information. Researchers have long been intrigued by the possibility that evolution could have gone in a different direction with DNA’s four bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). “It really speaks to the adaptability of the genetic alphabet,” Romesberg said. “Here was this wonderful validation that right under our noses, nature has been expanding,” said Stephen Freeland, a biologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
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