Scientists Discover a Bizarre New Way Life Can Make DNA… Without DNA
Scientists have discovered a bacterium that uses a unique biological mechanism to replicate DNA without using a DNA template. Instead, the system utilizes proteins and RNA as templates to independently generate complementary DNA strands.
Why it matters
This discovery challenges fundamental understandings of molecular biology and genetic replication, potentially opening new avenues for biotechnology and viral defense research.
Add ScienceAlert on Google A molecular illustration of the crowded interior and cell envelope of Escherichia coli . (David S. Goodsell, The Scripps Research Institute) To replicate information, life usually has fairly straightforward ways of doing things.
To copy DNA, you generally use DNA as a template. To make RNA, cells generally use DNA as a template, while RNA in turn provides the instructions for making proteins.
But now a bacterium has revealed a different path, and it's deeply surprising.
In one half of this newly discovered system, a protein acts as a molecular template for building a specific repeating DNA sequence – basically allowing information written in amino acids to determine information written in DNA.
And that's the wrong way round – a bit like using a cake as the template for writing a recipe, rather than using a recipe as the template for making a cake.
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