Doubling Our DNA Building Blocks Could Lead to New Life Forms

Ellington’s lab is engineering a library of enzymes to read and write not just natural DNA and hachimoji, but any of the variety of alphabets he foresees in the future. “We’re starting to think of it as ‘cryptogenetics,’” he says. The idea is to build the machinery necessary to read and write proprietary DNA languages. With cryptogenetics, IBM could have its own privileged genetic alphabet that no one else could translate. So could China. “An expanded alphabet gives you the opportunity to make bigger, better, stronger, faster things in general.”
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