After 15 years of effort, researchers
have effectively produced an active cell that holds two unnatural DNA structure
blocks. The development brings us one step nearer to being able to synthesize
cells that can yield drugs on request. It also unlocks the door to a future
where we might generate life that's unlike anything ever found on Planet Earth. "What we have now is a
living cell that literally stores increased genetic information," describes
Floyd Romesberg, who has directed the study for the past 15 years. It's also
worth underlining that we've influenced natural life to live in harmony with
synthetic genetic material, which surely is huge. After all, we've produced
synthetic DNA before. But this is a new form of cyborg DNA, and it's possibly
much more powerful.
Nature refers to these non-natural
bases somewhat generously as "alien." And while researchers surely
aren't dealing with aliens from space, they are dealing with something completely
external. Life on Earth has always enclosed the same four DNA subunits, also identified
as nucleotides, characterized by the letters A, T, C, and G. Now, the options
are apparently endless, as researchers have accurately extended that alphabet
to take in at least two new, unnatural subunits. We now recognize that the old
four-letter DNA model isn't the only way to generate life. Some even think that
it's conceivable to generate an organism exclusively out of the foreign
nucleotides. These bear little similarity to the four natural ones according to
Steven Benner, who founded this type of study back in the 1980s. "I don't
think there's any limit," Benner told Nature. "If you go back and
rerun evolution for four billion years, you could come up with a different
genetic system." So that's pretty mindboggling.
Though, it's also extremely hopeful as this kind of science could help us do abundant
things like cure cancer. That is, if we don't by accident generate some new form
of cancer first. The paper was published in NATURE.
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