The Los Alamos Bug

Posted by Zonk on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:39PM from the not-interested-in-acting-as-a-carrier dept.

Kannappan writes "'You somehow have to forget everything you know about life', says Steen Rasmussen, a colleague of Norman Packard. Packard and his team are working on creating life artificially, nicknamed The Los Alamos bug (pdf). It will be created out of a molecule called Peptide Nucleic Acid(PNA), with a blend of three different factors crucial to life, viz. containment, heredity and metabolism. The researchers believe that the synthetic lives so created will have an enormous practical value in producing clean fuels, healing injured bodies and acting as tiny diagnosticians roaming our bodies."

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Re:PNA? by caenorhabditas · 2005-10-23 17:31 · Score: 4, Informative

Normal nucleic acids are composed of sugar, base and phosphate. PNA as described in the article replaces the sugar and phosphate with a peptide (I assume with the R group replaced with the A, T, G or C). The replacement of the sugar-phosphate backbone with a peptide makes the nucleic acid soluble in fat, rather than soluble in water -- the ultimate goal of using PNA rather than DNA or RNA.

And no, I do not believe there are other life forms based on PNA.