Weird Viral DNA Spills Secrets to Biologists
30th April 2021
‘Alien’ genomes can be found on Earth. Some viruses that infect bacteria use an alternative genetic alphabet that’s distinct from the code used by nearly all other organisms — and, now, two teams have spelled out how the system works.
More than four decades in the making, the studies show how dozens of these bacteriophages (or just ‘phages’), as they are known, write their genomes using a chemical base called 2-aminoadenine, Z for short, instead of adenine — the A in the As, Ts, Cs and Gs of genetics textbooks.