Scientists Discover a Bizarre New Way Life Can Make DNA… Without DNA
28th August 2026
To copy DNA, you generally use DNA as a template. To make RNA, cells generally use DNA as a template, while RNA in turn provides the instructions for making proteins.
But now a bacterium has revealed a different path, and it’s deeply surprising.
In one half of this newly discovered system, a protein acts as a molecular template for building a specific repeating DNA sequence – basically allowing information written in amino acids to determine information written in DNA.