Scientists have created a bacteria with a genetic code more streamlined – and more meddled with – than any other life on Earth.

This bacteria, a synthetic Escherichia coli called Syn57, has been engineered to build its body using just 57 of the 64 ' codons ' that have served all known organisms for billions of years.

The recipe for life is written in a language that uses 64 different codons, each composed of a triplet of nucleotides. It's the long sentences of 'three-letter' codons that make up our DNA and RNA.

They provide our cells with the essential instructions to translate ordinary matter into the building blocks of life, amino acids, which are threaded in sequence to form proteins.

When a cell is building proteins, it 'reads' the codon sequence, written using those 64 nucle

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