Scientists have long believed that a universal genetic code serves as a blueprint for all life on Earth, dictating the structure and function of organisms from the simplest bacteria to complex humans.

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 amino acids. But certain groups of microbes have an expanded genetic code, in ...

There are few hard and fast rules in the study of life, but perhaps the closest we get is the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA is transcribed to RNA, which gets translated into proteins. The ...