In a giant feat of genetic engineering, scientists have created bacteria that make proteins in a radically different way than all natural species do. By Carl Zimmer At the heart of all life is a code.

This is a summary of: Liu. H. et al. Viral RNA blocks circularization to evade host codon usage control. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09809-y (2025).

While codons (combinations of three nucleotides) may vary in which do what functions, a long-standing rule was that each codon serves one specific purpose. New evidence, however suggests that ...

Most organisms on Earth have the same basic genetic code, but it comes with some flaws. Scientists sought to work out those errors by creating their own artificial genome, which replaced E. coli’s ...

The DNA of nearly all life on Earth contains many redundancies, and scientists have long wondered whether these redundancies served a purpose or if they were just leftovers from evolutionary processes ...

Synthetic biologists from Yale were able to re-write the genetic code of an organism — a novel genomically recoded organism (GRO) with one stop codon — using a cellular platform that they developed ...

61 codons specify one of the 20 amino acids that make up proteins 3 codons are stop codons, which signal the termination of protein synthesis Importantly, the genetic code is nearly universal, shared ...

A virus relies on the host's translation machinery to replicate itself and become infectious. Translation efficiency ...

A virus relies on the host's translation machinery to replicate itself and become infectious. Translation efficiency ...