XNA Is SYNTHETIC DNA Stronger Than The Real Thing. Futurism Boner.
Someone should wake up the guy who was bombing around Nietzsche’s market. If God isn’t dead, we’ve certainly delivered a five-fingered death punch to his thorax. XNA is synthetic DNA, only stronger.
io9:
New research has brought us closer than ever to synthesizing entirely new forms of life. An international team of researchers has shown that artificial nucleic acids – called “XNAs” – can replicate and evolve, just like DNA and RNA.
We spoke to one of the researchers who made this breakthrough, to find out how it can affect everything from genetic research to the search for alien life.
The researchers, led by Philipp Holliger and Vitor Pinheiro, synthetic biologists at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, say their findings have major implications in everything from biotherapeutics, to exobiology, to research into the origins of genetic information itself. This represents a huge breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology.
[Scientists] have been synthesizing XNA molecules for well over a decade. What makes the findings of Pinheiro and his colleagues so compelling isn’t the XNA molecules themselves, it’s what they’ve shown these alien molecules are capable of, namely: replication and evolution.
“Any polymer can store information,” Pinheiro tells io9. What makes DNA and RNA unique, he says, “is that the information encoded in them [in the form of genes, for example] can be accessed and copied.” Information that can be copied from one genetic polymer to another can be propagated; and genetic information that can be propagated is the basis for heredity – the passage of traits from parent to offspring.
Ridiculous stuff. You can check out the link above for more reading. It’s pretty heavy stuff. Creating new life forms and swag. My god. We are peering into the Abyss and giving it the finger.