WEDNESDAY, May 7, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Move over, Frankenstein! Your 21st-century counterpart has just been announced. In true sci-fi fashion, a team of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, Calif., has created a brand-new bacteria based on a genetic structure found nowhere on Earth. According to lead researcher Floyd Romesberg, the feat involved artificially engineering a unique combination of DNA material -- a combination not found in any living creature -- and then successfully inserting it into a living cell that usually contains only natural combinations of DNA. Life on Earth in all its diversity is encoded by only two pairs of DNA bases, A-T and C-G, Romesberg explained in an institute news release. And what weve made is an organism that stably contains those two plus a third, unnatural pair of bases. This shows that other solutions to storing [genetic] information are possible, he added, and, of course, takes us closer to an expanded-DNA biology that will have many exciting applications -- from new medicines to new kinds of nanotechnology.
Posted on: Thu, 08 May 2014 00:17:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015