Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet

What matters in science this week | View this email in your browser Friday 22 February 2019 Hello Nature readers,Nature’s annual ScientistAtWork photo competition has begun! You could see your photo published in Nature, plus win a cash prize and a year’s subscription. Pics should show scientists taking part in their craft — in or out of the lab. Find out more information here or check out last year’s stunners. An X-ray diffraction image of part of a molecule of DNA. The new, 8-letter version, is similarly stable. (Science Source/Science Photo Library) Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet Researchers have created a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA. The study implies that there is nothing particularly special about the four chemicals that make up the DNA of all life on Earth — guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T. 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To potentially harness the power of viruses for good, we need to get to work on classifying the rest, argues virologist Jens Kuhn. “It’s daunting of course. It sounds crazy at the moment,” but we have the technology, he says in this week’s Nature podcast. Also in this episode, we hear that researchers are making atlases of every cell in mouse embryos. Nature Podcast | 25 min listen Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on iTunes or Google Podcasts. BOOKS & ARTS Left to right: Sarah Champion, Stephen Gadd, Jeni Bern and Mark Le Brocq in Anthropocene. (James Glossop) Arias for the Anthropocene In a new opera inspired by environmental catastrophe, the Anthropocene is not just the geological epoch that bears our grubby fingerprints; it is also the name of an Arctic research ship that becomes trapped in ice and uncovers a mystery. Reviewer Patrick Goymer, chief editor of Nature Ecology & Evolution, lauds the music but questions the depth of enquiry offered by the tale. 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I’ve been enjoying playing around with eLife’s example of a “computationally reproducible article” in which you can inspect, change and run the code that was used to generate the figures right there in your web browser. Let me know what you think at [email protected]. Thanks for reading!Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing Join our community You received this newsletter because you subscribed with the email address: Forwarded by a friend? Get the Briefing straight to your inbox: subscribe for free. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the Nature Briefing. Fancy a bit of a read? View our privacy policy. Nature | The Springer Nature Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom Nature Research, part of Springer Nature. © 2019 Springer Nature Limited. All rights reserved. This email was sent to why did I get this? unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences Nature · The SpringerNature Campus · 4 Crinan Street · London, N1 9XW · United Kingdom