Interesting things about biology

Random list of fascinating bio-stuff:

1. Synthetic Biology: Engineering organisms from the scratch. Playing God. (Interesting area of research)

2. Mollicutes: creatures so small they contain only a billion atoms

3. Biobricks: Building blocs of synthetic organisms

4. Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, have modified a bacterium to read a word(codon) that normally means “stop making protein” as “add a weird amino acid here.”

5. Some molecules come in two mirror-image forms, like a pair of hands. Nature uses left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. If synthetic organisms worked the other way around, they would be incapable of making use of natural foodstuffs, thus ruling out most of the ways they could disrupt natural ecosystems.

Source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/mit_pr.html

Possibly related posts (automagically generated):

• What is Synthetic Biology?
• A comics on Synthetic Biology
• Microsoft announces Synthetic Biology
• The Mystery behind Genetic Code
• A formal definition of Synthetic Biology

This entry was posted on August 21st, 2005 and is filed under Biology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.