New Amino Acid Discovered

EricMargel writes: "As published in Science, researchers at the Ohio State University claim to have discovered the 22nd known amino acid, pyrrolysine, the first discovered since 1986." I hope rice and beans are still sufficient to get all the needed amino acids.

Comments

Re:Importance of this discovery?

[bioart]

The importance of this, if it holds out in other organisms, is that we usually look for an "Open Reading Frame (ORF)" when identifying many new genes... this ORF is defined as a stretch of Amino Acids (coded by DNA) without any Stop codons (there are three stop codons (three letter triplet)) As soon as we see a stop codon, we usually stop. IF this is indeed a new amino acid coded (sometimes) by one of these stop codons, we will have to look back at how we call genes. Some of the genes may be longer than we think.

However, this is probably a very, very rare occurence and it could be that this only happens in a small subset of organims, meaning that it will have no effect on Humans or most other relevant "model systems"

Nonetheless, this is very cool :)

Re:21st amino acid

[aswang]

Evolution is all about kludges and supporting legacy operating systems. The genetic code is pretty much completely backwards compatible back to the most ancient prokaryote (though I'm not sure if it's completely the same in the archae kingdom) Nature also often ends up reusing code for completely unrelated purposes. And Nature never, ever throws away legacy code until she really, really has to. There are all sorts of non-working remnants from millions of years ago still floating around in our heterochromatin. And yet, for us humans at least, everything seems to fit in under 3 GB, including all the bloat and non-working code.

Metaphysical Towers

[Alien54]

This is sure to throw a monkey wrench into the speculations of folks who have built metaphysical towers based on the number 21.

Even more so now that researchers are looking for numbers 23 and 24.

Strange stuff indeed. That is the problem with this class of metaphysician. reality intrudes from time to time.

Re:Infinite number of amino acids

[IdahoEv]

but interestingly only 20 or 22 are found in life. And only the levorotary form at the amine carbon is found.

At the risk of nitpicking, significantly more than 20 or 22 amino acids are found in life, just not as building blocks of proteins. Take for example dopamine, which is an amino acid not used in proteins in any known organism, but a rather common neurotransmitter in most animals.