Scientists Discovered a Creature That Breaks a Fundamental Rule of Biology

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• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  “Objectively, ambiguity in the genetic code should be deleterious; you end up generating a random pool of proteins,” Dipti Nayak, senior author of the paper from UC Berkeley, said in a press statement. “But biological systems are more ambiguous than we give them credit to be and that ambiguity is actually a feature—it’s not a bug.”

  What a beautiful way to restate the fact that genetics are fundamentally a language for it is the same exact mechanism that imbues human language with power.

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• acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  “The UAG codon is like a fork in the road, where it can be interpreted either as a stop codon or as a pyrrolysine residue,” Shalvarjian said in a press statement. […] Preliminary findings suggest that the archaea’s choice isn’t completely random. When the amino acid is flooding the cell, the microbe tends to interpret UAG as integrated pyrrolysine and turn it into the appropriate protein. However, when less of it was around, UAG often acted as a stop codon, which yields a different protein entirely.

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