We have gone further than ever before in creating life that is unlike anything that has evolved naturally. The genome of an Escherichia coli bacterium has been redesigned on a computer to use just 57 ...

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).

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...