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Researchers Design DNA With New Shapes and Structures
Jason Koebler writes: The shape of DNA is a double helix, right? That's what we are taught. Well, now the answer is "not always." Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered how to program DNA to be shaped like a bowl, or a spiral, or a ring, or other shapes that aren't found in nature.
It's the latest in a string of discoveries about the underlying structure of life and the building blocks by which it's made. Recently, scientists created new nucleotides that do not exist in nature and inserted them into a living organism. And now, this: DNA can look like just about anything and can be assembled into many shapes.
It's the latest in a string of discoveries about the underlying structure of life and the building blocks by which it's made. Recently, scientists created new nucleotides that do not exist in nature and inserted them into a living organism. And now, this: DNA can look like just about anything and can be assembled into many shapes.
This should be a given, this is how the body makes proteins. The "recipe" is stored in the DNA, the transcriber runs along the DNA making a copy and then it folds into the protein when the copy is complete. A small mistake in the transcription and it doesn't fold into the right protein or doesn't fold at all. This is why protein research is so hard right now, they don't fully understand what governs how the proteins fold.
This research may give them a leg up on understanding that, very cool that they figured out some of the rules.